BESIEGED 

BY THE 

BOERS 




LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 



Chap. Copyright No........ 

Shelf...,.j^./) Xl' 

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



EIMBERLET. 

SIEGESOUP 

Town Hall Depot 

TWO_PJTS. 

fcsuer.....^..:,(;3^?.>ib 



BESIEGED BY THE BOERS 



Digitized by the Internet Archive 
in 2010 with funding from 
The Library of Congress 



http://www.archive.org/details/besiegedbyboersd01ashe 




SOME EFFECTS OF A IOO-1'OUND SHELL 



BESIEGED 

By the 

BOERS 



A Diary of Life and Events 
in Kimberley during the Siege 



By/ 

E. OLIVER ASHE, M.D., 

London, F. R. C. S. Eng., Surgeon to the Kimberley Hospital. 

1rllU6tratc^ 



NEW YORK 

DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & CO. 

1900 



fe'i3':i:;i 



TWO Co Hi Co <<e.cClVKOy 
library 0/ Congrtt% 
Office of tii§ * 

im 7 - 1900 

Begltttr of Copyrlgklft 

Jfp>^ S', /900 



^/7' 



Copyright, 1900, Kv • -TX J TV • 



E. Oliver Ashe. 



^•^^VrAi 




TO MY MOTHER 

AT HOME IN ENGLAND. 

I WROTE THIS DIARY, DAY BY 
DAY, WITH NO IDEA OF EVER PUB- 
LISHING IT. NOW THAT I AM LED 
TO CHANGE MY PLAN, TO HER 

I DEDICATE THIS BOOK. 
KIMBERLEY, MARCH 6, 1900. 



My hearty thanks are due to Mr. 
Marcus Bennett, Mr. C. Evans, 
Mr. F. H. Hancox and Dr. 
Stoney for the photographs with 
which they have kindly per- 
mitted me to illustrate this diary. 
E. o. A. 



INTRODUCTION 



KiMBERLEY is the second largest town in Cape 
Colony, and is the largest diamond mining cen- 
tre in the world. It came into existence in 
1870 with the discovery of diamonds, and, in- 
cluding its suburbs of Kenilworth, Beacons- 
field, and Wesselton, has now a population of 
about 40,000, of which 25,000 are white. The 
three principal mines — Kimberley, De Beers, 
and Wesselton — are worked by the De Beers 
Consolidated Mines, Limited. This immense 
Company, of which Mr. Rhodes is the Chair- 
man, has a capital of nearly four millions; pays 
well over a million a year in wages, and turns 
out ten thousand pounds^ worth of rough dia- 
monds every working day. All Kimberley 
makes its living directly or indirectly from the 
Company, and for all practical purposes Kim- 
berley and the Company are one. The town 
is 647 miles by rail from Cape Town and 485 
from Port Elizabeth, and there is no English 
town nearer than the last named place. The 
Cape Town to Buluwayo Line passes through 



the town, but from the Orange River {"jy 
miles south of Kimberley) it runs for quite 
400 miles close to the Orange Free State and 
Transvaal borders, never more than ten miles, 
often only two or three away from them. Kim- 
berley itself is about four miles from the bor- 
der. From its isolated position it could there- 
fore be cut off with the greatest ease, and only 
relieved with the greatest difficulty, while the 
chance of looting its shops and well-furnished 
private houses naturally have had an irresist- 
ible attraction for the pious Boer and his still 
more pious frouw. 



MEDICAL raMFORTJERTIFIGATE. 

nate.M:Vj.f?>^ A- 1900 

P]eMe Sitpply -...^ 

Name (in full) i!jS&?k?:i>...^^^k^J^.AseAe..Yeax9 
Address -f(?/./!^SW^ek:fe^;^W€^V^ 

withi^...^^f^hi^^^:^rk^^ 

Nature of Complaint i 

Signature of Doctor ,r^kff}^^V:i^hm,^ 



Countersigned 



N.B. — ^This certificate Djust be countersigned at the Office in 
Chapel-street (back ot White's Bairdressing Establishment, Du- 
toitspan Road), between the hours of 10 a m. and 12 noon, and 
j&om 4 p.iD- to 6 p.m., and not taken to Lennos-street.. 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I The Boers Strike First ... 3 

II Fighting and Raiding . . • 17 

III The Bombardment Begins . -31 

IV "With C. J. Rhodes' Compli- 



V MiHtary Eccentricities 

VI The Food Problem . 
VII Horse for Dinner 

VIII Our Big Gun and the Boers 
Bigger One 
IX The Rush for Shelter . . . 
X A New Use for Diamond Mines . 
XI Relief at Last .... 



47 
60 

78 

93 

112 
126 
149 
169 



Ahc«Iam 4r^M Ml 1 1 1# to be taken to Schmidt's Store, Market Sq. 
OroCrTOr IfflllK Hours : 7 am. to 12 noon. ^ 

Fresh Milk at 7 a.m. Condensed Milk at 10 a.m. 

(Sundava included) • (except Sundays) 

iVflme...Z^^^^ - ^^e,/?!^?'*^^*^ 

Address S'^ l\£H/^^\yO^P^U>t^ n^fi^K^ 

Length of Time {^^i,)..__^^...^l:^k^^^^ 



Date^MjJ^.lJt^ 

j/^^^^ .^?^^.lC:€^-. 

Medical Practitioner. 
All orders foi* TreSh or Condensed Milk must be renewed fortniglUly. 
Applicant must take a clean jug to the depdt. Charge $firper half -bottle. 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 



Some Effects of a loo-pound Shell. Frontispiece 

FACING PAGE 

A Peaceful Spot . . . . . .4 

The Armoured Train 8 

Kenilworth Barricade 14 

Mr. Rhodes's Notice at the Barbed-wire 

Barrier ....... 14 

The Conning Tower 20 

Search and Signal Light at Wesselton . 30 

Boer Shrapnel Shell, with Time Fuse . 40 

The Kimberley Reservoir during the Siege 44 

Royal Artillery in Action at the Reservoir 48 
Inspection of Boers, Bosman's Commando, 

at Christiana 54 

Distribution of the Meat Supply . . 84 

Horse-meat Notice 94 

The Sanatorium, with a Maxim Gun on 

the Veranda 106 



FACING PAGE 

"Long Cecil*' and his Makers . . .112 
Boer 100-pound Shell and De Beers 

9-pounders 122 

The Kimberley Town Hall , . .130 
Our Shelter, East Side . . . .134 
Our Shelter, West Side . . . .134 
Shelters from the Big Gun in a Debris 

Heap 136 

The Convent Shelter 144 

The Shelter at the Public Works Depart- 
ment 148 

Mr. Rhodes's Notice 150 

On the Look-out 158 

Lieutenant-colonel R. G. Kekewich . . 166 
Hon. Cecil J. Rhodes . . . .174 



BESIEGED BY THE BOERS 



CHAPTER I 

THE BOERS STRIKE FIRST 

KiMBERLEY, November i8, i8pp. 

NO one knows when this will get posted, for 
it is five weeks to-day since we were cut 
off from the outside world, and though all 
along we have been hearing of troops on the 
way to relieve us, they are just as far off as 
ever for all we know. I think, therefore, that 
as there will be so much to write about when 
we are relieved I had better be getting some of 
it jotted down. 

My last letter was written on October 8th, 
the day after we had had the parade of all our 
defence forces. Things went along quietly the 
first part of the next week, though we kept 
hearing plenty of rumours as to the Boer move- 
ments, but on Thursday, October I2tli, hostili- 
ties really began near Mafeking. Colonel 
Baden-Powell, who commanded there, seeing 
that war was inevitable, practically ordered all 



4 BESIEGED BY THE BOERS 

the women and children to leave, as he foresaw 
that the place would be very aggressively at- 
tacked. 

These non-combatants left in a special train, 
an armour-plated train escorting it as far as 
Vryburg. It then started on the return jour- 
ney. All went well till Kraaipan was reached, 
about twenty miles this side of Mafeking, where 
the Boers had torn up the rails so that the train 
ran off the road and came to a standstill. Then 
they pounded away at her with rifles and a 
small field gun until all resistance ceased, after 
which any men left alive were taken prisoners 
and carried off. 

The first report we got was that the Boers 
had put a big gun directly in front of the re- 
turning train and blown the whole thing to bits, 
killing every soul in it. This, however, turned 
out to be untrue, as the engine driver managed 
to elude the Boers, and got away to Vryburg and 
gave the correct version. Lieutenant Nesbit, 
who was in charge of the train, had been 
warned that the Boers held the line and that 
it was unsafe for him to return; but I suppose 
he thought there was just a chance of getting 
through, and so he risked it. He was reported 
to be badly wounded, but we have no further 
news of him as yet. 

This business considerably astonished us here 



THE BOERS STRIKE FIRST 5 

in Kimberley, for though the people further up 
country all said that war was certain to come, 
we did not at all believe it. The result of course 
was to increase the activity of the military, po- 
lice and town guard, and everything was done 
to hurry on our defences as quickly as possi- 
ble. The 13th and 14th passed quietly with- 
out any alarm, but late on the night of the 
14th (Saturday) a well known man sent for me 
to come out to see his sick child, and told me 
news had just come in that the railway had 
been torn up at Spytfontein, about eight miles 
south of Kimberley. Next morning, about 6.30 
A.M., Stoney came in to tell me that the railway 
had also been cut at Riverton Road, ten miles 
north of Kimberley, and the water-works at 
Riverton had been taken by the Boers and our 
water supply cut off, so we were practically in a 
state of siege. The alarm was to sound at about 
9 A.M. and every one would have to go to his 
post. This was nice news, but all we could do 
was to make the best of it. 

My first move was to fill up my big rain- 
water tank, the big bath, and every available 
receptacle, so that we should have a reserve to 
fall back upon in case of need, and most of the 
people did the same thing. 

On the next day notice was given that in 
order to economise water as much as possible 



6 BESIEGED BY THE BOERS 

(the reservoir in the town only holding enough' 
for about three weeks) the supply would only 
be turned on from nine to eleven o'clock each 
morning, and that any one found watering a 
garden or caught using water for anything ex- 
cept purely domestic and necessary purposes 
would have his supply permanently cut off, 
without respect to persons. 

Quite early in the morning a big proclama- 
tion was issued that from that time forward 
martial law was in force, and that no one would 
be allowed out of his house between 9 p.m and 
6 A.M., without a special permit. All sorts of 
other subjects were touched upon in the procla- 
mation, but that was the most important. I went 
round doing my work as usual, but at about 11 
A.M. the ^'hooters" gave the alarm, and every 
one hurried to his post. Many people had been 
warned and expected the alarm, but in the lower 
quarters of the town it came as a surprise, and 
there was quite a panic there. In some of the 
better streets, too, where a few excitable women 
lived near each other, there was a good deal of 
excitement, for the women ran around frighten- 
ing each other with yarns as to the number of 
Boers that could be seen advancing and how 
very easily they could take Kimberley and all 
the rest of it. 

For some time before this the garrison had 



THE BOERS STRIKE FIRST 7 

been busy putting up earthworks and loopholed 
forts, in the most saHent positions all round the 
town, on the tops of the d^ris heaps, and at 
the points which commanded the roads, etc. 
They had also formed a town guard, which near- 
ly all the able-bodied men of all ranks joined, 
and these men turned out to man the forts. 
We had only about six hundred regulars here, 
and about the same number of volunteers and 
volunteer artillery. These had all been in camp 
for some days, but as the circle enclosed by the 
forts was fully thirteen miles in circumference 
they could not adequately man the forts, so the 
idea was and has been all along that the town 
guard should man the forts, while the regulars, 
volunteers, and artillery were camped in a cen- 
tral position ready to turn out and proceed to 
any quarter upon which an attack was made. 

Rumours kept flying round all the morning, 
but nothing happened. A patrol of the mounted 
police went out towards Riverton, and was 
chased by a superior force of Dutch and had 
to leave behind two men whose horses were 
either shot or fell with them. One of the men 
I knew well, as he was the man from whom I 
always bought my horns. They were reported 
shot, but some days after we heard that they 
had only been made prisoners. 

The armoured train went out both sides of 



8 BESIEGED BY THE BOERS 

Kitnberley, and was fired on and forced to re- 
treat, and so it wore on to night, nothing hap- 
pening, but many rumours going the rounds. 

Just before the outbreak Dr. Fuller decided 
to send his wife and family away to Cape Town, 
and he went part of the way with them. He 
had only just got back when he got a wire that 
his baby had been killed in an accident near 
Beaufort West, so off he went on Friday to his 
wife, passing Dr. Watkins on the way, the lat- 
ter on his return from an English holiday. On 
Saturday the railway was cut, and so Fuller 
could not return, but had to go on to Cape 
Town, and Watkins took his place to work with 
me at the hospital. 

Another doctor who had only just bought a 
practice here fled on Saturday. I used to know 
him some years ago, and thought he was all 
right; but he has since married a Dutchwoman 
and degenerated, to all appearances, into a thor- 
ough-going Boer. His wife's sister is the wife 
of a Kimberley lawyer, a prominent Bondsman, 
and as disloyal as the rest of that ilk. As soon 
as the trouble began the lawyer cleared out, 
and is supposed to have taken the doctor with 
him. He is reported to be with the besieging 
Boers, but those who know him do not be- 
lieve he will push far to the front with them, 
unless they happen to be running away, though 



THE BOERS STRIKE FIRST 9 

his intimate knowledge of Kimberley may be 
useful to them. But I imagine the Kimberley 
people won't patronise that doctor much if he 
ever has the audacity to re-establish himself 
here. 

Rhodes turned up here too the last day the 
railway was open. Many people were wild with 
indignation against him, thinking that he would 
be an additional inducement to the Boers to 
attack us, but I think it was very plucky of 
him to come and stand by the town which made 
him, and with which he is so intimately con- 
nected. He did not stay idle long, but began 
at once to raise a regiment of his own, the Kim- 
berley Light Horse, paying for everything in 
connection with them out of his own pocket. 

Next day, Monday, October i6th, was much 
quieter; nothing had been seen or heard of the 
Dutch, and there were various rumours that 
relief from Orange River was close at hand, 
which quieted people down a good deal. 

The 17th was not a happy day for us alto- 
gether, though we heard that the Boers had 
been beaten back from Mafeking and lost many 
men, while nearer home we heard that the peo- 
ple at Vryburg and Warrenton were either too 
afraid or too disloyal to help the mounted police 
there, and as the latter were far too few to 
defend the places successfully without the 



10- BESIEGED BY THE BOERS 

townspeople's aid they retired on Kimberley, 
leaving Vryburg and the Fourteen Streams 
Bridge at Warrenton over the Vaal River to 
the Dutch. The captain in charge of the Vry- 
burg men was so broken down at having to 
retreat that he blew his brains out, a few miles 
from Vryburg. The men at Fourteen Streams 
left their tents with lights burning in them, but 
brought everything else off safely. When 
morning came the Dutch fired into the deserted 
camp for two hours, and then sent a Kaffir to 
see whether any one was left alive ! They were 
surprised to find every one had gone. 

The two bodies of police got in safely via 
Barkley on Wednesday, October i8th. Nothing 
happened except that Agnes' troubles began. 
Many people had rushed into town on the first 
day of alarm and had no occupation or means 
of livelihood, and a relief committee was formed 
to enquire into their cases and help them if they 
were deserving. Agnes, always too willing 
where any unfortunates were to be helped, com- 
menced to work six hours a day in this cause. 
After a few days she was quite exhausted, so I 
cut the work down to three, and even that 
proved too much for her after a couple of weeks. 
When there was talk of relief, many people de- 
clined to work, but tried their best to get food 
for nothing. 



THE BOERS STRIKE FIRST 11 

One day over one hundred and sixty natives 
were told that if they wanted help they must 
work for it, and stone breaking work was of- 
fered them. Three only accepted it. This was 
a fair example of the style of most of the peo- 
ple who applied for relief. 

On Thursday, October 19th, there were all 
sorts of rumours about as to the railway hav- 
ing been broken all the way down to Hex River, 
and that the Colonial Dutch had risen to join 
the Transvaal. This made a run on the pro- 
vision stores, as, if it was true, it meant that it 
would be a long time before we could get new 
supplies of food in. At least most people 
thought so, forgetting that most of our supplies 
came via Port Elizabeth, which is nearly two 
hundred miles nearer. Anyhow there was a 
run on provisions, etc., and the store-keepers 
naturally put the prices up. Paraffin, which 
had been selling at 16s. 6d., went up to £3 for 
a ten-gallon case, and other things in propor- 
tion. We had laid by a fair stock of stuff pre- 
vious to this, but I got in two additional sacks 
of flour, to be on the safe side. 

This tremendous run up of prices made it 
very hard on the poor, so the military authori- 
ties took the matter in hand and issued a proc- 
lamation next day that all prices were to be 
the same exactly as they were before the siege 



12 BESIEGED BY THE BOERS 

began. This was a very good thing, and of 
course they took good care to see that it was 
carried out by instituting heavy penalties for 
any store-keeper who overcharged. 

We have had plenty of military proclama- 
tions, but most of them have been wise, such as 
forbidding the sale of liquor to natives except 
during very limited hours, and later on abso- 
lutely prohibiting the sale of liquor to them at 
all. The bar-keepers did not like this last one, 
but after one of them had been fined £30 and his 
bar completely closed till the end of the siege 
came they saw that they had to obey it. 

At about this time my new single-horse trap 
was completed, and I tried two of my horses 
in it and found they went very well. I there- 
fore thought that I would sell out all but my 
best horses, and do the work with three or even 
two if the keeping of them got to be too dear. 
I played the role of the good citizen by lend- 
ing one horse to the volunteers, on condition 
that I was to have him back when things came 
right. Even if he died or got shot it was bet- 
ter than having him looted by a thieving Boer. 
I sold another animal to the Light Horse, and 
found that I could do my work with the three 
remaining quite well, running a single horse 
half the day and the old cart with a pair the 
other half. 

About the first day I had the new cart out I 



THE BOERS STRIKE FIRST 13 

had an amusing experience. After the prelimi- 
nary alarm the military people blocked all the 
small streets leading into the town with barri- 
cades of old waggons, carts, water-tanks, and 
other heavy lumber, and where this was not 
available they put up strong, high, barbed- wire 
fences, with eight or nine strands. 

The main streets were barricaded in just the 
same way as the small ones, but an opening was 
left in the centre and a guard, either of volun- 
teers or town guard or police, was put on duty 
there, with orders to allow no one to pass in 
or out without a properly signed permit, and 
even then to search both their carts and pockets 
if they thought fit. The first day these orders 
were in force I wanted to see a patient about one 
hundred yards beyond one of the barriers. I 
did not know the orders, as no notice of them 
had been given, and when I got near the bar- 
rier I saw carts being stopped, so I said to the 
man on guard, ''Are you going to stop me, 
too?" 

''Yes," he said, "unless you have a permit." 

"May I leave my cart here and walk over 
there to see the patient?" 

"No, if you have no permit neither you nor 
the cart can pass." 

So I said, "All right, orders are orders; I 
will go and get a pass." 

The joke was that the man on ^uard was a 



14 BESIEGED BY THE BOERS 

patient of my own and knew me well, but he 
was quite right. 

On more than one occasion Rhodes has been 
stopped at the barrier and asked for his per- 
mit, and at one barrier where the orders were 
to search everybody, the guards stopped him 
and told him that he would have to be searched. 
Rhodes fumed and blustered and said he had 
never heard of such damned insolence, but the 
guard was firm, so Rhodes burst out laughing 
and produced a permit to pass the barrier with- 
out being searched. He was just testing the 
men's discipline. Whatever else he may be, he 
is no coward; he goes through the barrier and 
rides far out on the veldt almost every after- 
noon, with only one or two friends and no 
escort at all. He always wears white flannel 
trousers, and is most conspicuous. Nothing 
could save him if a Boer chose to lie in wait and 
pot him with a long range shot, and as the 
Mauser rifle which the Boers use carries well 
over a mile the marksman could be well in 
among his own people long before any of our 
soldiers could get a chance at him. 

That this could easily happen is shown by 
what occurred on October 20th. A patrol of 
the mounted volunteers (Diamond Fields' 
Horse) was out scouting early in the morning. 
No Boers were seen anywhere about, when 




KENILWORTII BARRICADE. 




MR. RHODES'S NOTICE AT THE BARBED-WIRE BARRIER. 



THE BOERS STRIKE FIRST 15 

without warning a shot was fired and one of 
the sergeants fell off his horse, dead. The men 
hunted the whole country in the neighbourhood, 
but could not find a sign or footprint of any- 
body. The modern rifle fires smokeless pow- 
der, so no smoke was seen and no one knows 
who fired the shot. 

On the same day we heard that the Boers had 
issued a proclamation declaring Bechuanaland 
to be Transvaal and Griqualand West, Orange 
Free State territory, but of course our com- 
mander. Colonel Kekewich, promptly issued a 
counter proclamation warning all loyal subjects 
not to have any faith with such misrepresenta- 
tions, as these territories were still British in 
spite of the Boer proclamation. 

Kekewich is the colonel in command of the 
Lancashires; he is a Devonshire man, though 
his name does not sound like it, and is a splen- 
did fellow. Everybody likes him. He is the 
head of the whole business, and must have had 
an anxious time, as he is responsible for every- 
thing. I think I mentioned that a lookout 
tower has been put up on top of the most cen- 
trally situated mine head-gear. This must be 
about one hundred and twenty feet above the 
street level, and gives a splendid view of all 
the surrounding country, and here the colonel 
spends most of his day, watching what the 



16 BESIEGED BY THE BOERS 

Boers, and our own men, too, for that matter, 
are up to. The top of this tower is in tele- 
phonic communication with all the forts, so that 
orders are sent from it to all points with great 
rapidity. At night there are strong electric 
search-lights in commanding positions at the 
forts, and these are at work during all the dark 
hours, so that it is impossible for the Boers to 
make any advance without its being known at 
once. That is the advantage of having an im- 
mensely wealthy Company like the De Beers 
in the place. They have skilled mechanics and 
electricians and machinery and appliances to do 
almost anything, and we do not now know what 
we should have done without them. As a mat- 
ter of fact, though, we should never have been 
besieged but for the mines. The Boers openly 
gave out that they wanted to take Rhodes pris- 
oner and to blow up his mines, and did not 
wish to injure anybody else. 

After the first alarm the De Beers people 
brought in all or a great part of their cattle 
from their outlying farms and herded about 
fifteen hundred of them just outside Kenil- 
worth. Having failed to do much by cutting 
off our water supply, the enemy thought they 
would try for our food supply next, and I sup- 
pose their natural love of cattle stirred them 
up, too, for if there is anything for which a 
Boer will risk his life it is cattle. 



CHAPTER II 

FIGHTING AND RAIDING 

On Tuesday, October 24th, a patrol of our men 
was out, and ran across a strong force of Boers, 
whose object was evidently to raid cattle. A 
brisk engagement ensued about six miles out, 
and re-enforcements went out to our men ; but, 
owing to their being guided by a man who did 
not know the ground well, they got into diffi- 
culties, and were attacked by a body of Boers 
who had taken up their position behind the bank 
of a dry dam, the existence of which the guide 
was ignorant. The colonel, seeing there was 
likely to be a defeat, sent out some of the Lan- 
cashires in the armoured train, and they prompt- 
ly drove out the Boers, converting what was 
very nearly a disaster into a drawn game. The 
Boers drew off and so did we. The casualties 
on our side were pretty large— three killed and 
about twenty-five wounded, four of them se- 
verely. Out of the wounded, three were offi- 
cers, two of them badly hit, the bullets splinter- 



IS. BESIEGED BY THE BOERS 

ing the thigh bone in both cases. The Boer 
loss was not and never will be known, but must 
have been pretty heavy. The only certain thing 
about it was that their commandant was killed. 
He was left on the field when the Boers retired, 
and being a man from Boshof and well known 
in Kimberley he was easily identified by our 
people. He was in Kimberley on the Saturday 
afternoon that all the forces were reviewed, 
and is reported to have rather sneered at the 
show, saying it would just be a comfortable 
handful for the Boers. He met his death early, 
and, as he was well known and popular among 
the Boers, his death must have disconcerted 
them considerably. 

We had a pretty busy time at the hospital 
when the wounded came in. I got five of them 
under my hands, but only two were more than 
trifles — an officer shot through the chest, and a 
sergeant shot through the arm, splintering up 
the bone. We doctors had all of us seen a few 
bullet wounds with revolvers and such like, but 
had no experience of the modern rifle bullet, and 
it was a revelation to us. The bullet, especially 
of the Mauser rifle which the Dutch use, is so 
small and travels with such velocity that it drills 
clean through everything, and unless it strikes 
a vital part or hits a bone or big artery the in- 
jury it inflicts is ridiculous. The officer shot 



FIGHTING AND RAIDING 19 

through the chest left the hospital on the eighth 
day, and returned to duty on the ninth, though 
this consisted of at least twelve miles' riding 
every day. Wounds through the fleshy parts 
heal in a couple of days, and give no trouble 
after a week. But a Mauser bullet will drive 
clean through anything. One poor chap in an- 
other engagement was shot in the ribs of the 
right side far back, and the bullet travelled 
right through him in a slanting direction and 
came out at the outer side of the left thigh about 
its middle, cutting the spine right across on 
its way and completely paralysing him. He 
only lived a few hours. Another bullet in this 
Dronfield fight of which I have been speaking 
hit the ammunition box of the Maxim gun. 
The ammunition is carried in a stout canvas 
belt, like the leather bandolier. The box is 
strong and the cartridges are solid brass (not 
cardboard), and yet the bullet drove through 
the box and through no less than ten cartridges 
with the intervening twenty thicknesses of can- 
vas, and none of the cartridges exploded. 

After this brush things were very quiet for 
several days. We, got news of some of the 
Natal fights, and heard that the Boers had been 
repulsed from Mafeking every time they tried 
to take it, which encouraged us a good deal. 
There were many disquieting rumours though 



20. BESIEGED BY THE BOERS 

as to the strength of the Boers, and the big 
siege guns they were bringing to bombard us 
with. The alarmists talked glibly about forty 
pounders, though our artillerymen told us that 
a forty pounder is so heavy that it would take 
about seventy mules or oxen to drag it. This, 
however, was a detail which the alarmists ig- 
nored. 

From the 8th of October on we had beauti- 
ful rains at intervals of a few days, and the 
water came in very handy. I got in another 
big water-tank, and arranged my water-pipes 
to run into it. During each rain I filled every 
available receptacle, just like old times at home. 
Our garden was coming on beautifully when 
we had to give up watering it, but the rains 
kept it just going, and I managed to keep the 
vines and vegetables alive with bath and refuse 
water. At first we filled the tanks and kept 
them as a reserve in case the water in the reser- 
voir gave out before we were relieved, but by 
the time we had been shut up about three weeks 
the De Beers Company, as usual, came to the 
rescue. 

One of their mines, the Wesselton, has a 
big stream of underground water in it, and this 
water has for the last year or two been pumped 
into a dam at Kenilworth, from which it is 
taken to the floors and used for washing "the 




THE CONNING TOWER. 



FIGHTING AND RAIDING 21 

blue" or diamondiferous earth. In one place 
this water-main ran close to the water com- 
pany's main, so De Beers put on a gang of 
Kaffirs and joined the two, after which he was 
able to pump from The Wesselton to the reser- 
voir. So we had a good supply of water once 
more, much harder than our regular supply 
from the Vaal River, but quite good all the 
same, and sufficient for all purposes except wa- 
tering gardens. After this supply was fixed 
up we felt safe in using any rain-water we saved 
for the garden, and did so; but a good many 
of the shallow-rooted things had died, though 
the vegetables were flourishing. The first ru- 
mour about the water-works had been that the 
Boers had blown the pumping machinery up 
on the first day of the siege, but later this turned 
out to be incorrect. They took possession of 
it and were going to blow it up, but the wily 
engineer, who was captured at the same time, 
is reported to have said, "Why do you destroy 
your own property? When you have taken 
Kimberley you will want a water supply just 
the same, and it will cost a good deal to replace 
the machinery." He went on to suggest that 
they could cut off the Kimberley water, and do 
themselves a good turn at the same time, by 
pulling up the pipes at a place six miles from 
the river, where they ran through a pan which 



22 , BESIEGED BY THE BOERS 

had water in it only after very heavy rains. 
Then they could pump river water into this pan, 
and thus have a watering place for their horses 
much nearer Kimberley. The Boers were 
agreeable to this plan and carried it out. Of 
course the engineer's idea was to try and save 
the pumps if possible. But the Boers have 
laid dynamite ready to blow them up if they 
have to retreat, and they probably will do so 
unless the engineer manages to wet the dyna- 
mite. 

The hotel-keeper at Riverton, where we have 
stayed several times, is said to be doing a roar- 
ing trade, as the Boers are paying him for all 
they take, but this was arranged by the com- 
mandant who was shot. He was a great friend 
of the hotel-keeper's. Whether this state of 
things will go on now nobody knows, but the 
Boers are quite equal to demanding every penny 
he has and then shooting him when they retreat. 
That is what one is afraid of for the outlying 
people. So long as all goes well with them, 
the Boers may be fairly civil, but when they 
are beaten and have to retreat there is no das- 
tardly cruelty that they will not do. The cow- 
ardly brutes have said that in that case they 
intend to shoot men, women, and children. On 
the other hand, if they were to win, their pro- 
gramme, as laid down by their own rabble, is 



FIGHTING AND RAIDING 23 

"to shoot all the Englishmen and to give their 
women to the Kafifirs." These are the people 
of whom Olive Schreiner writes, "the simple, 
God-fearing farmer," etc. 

All this time we were of course under mar- 
tial law, and not allowed out between nine and 
six without a permit. Many special constables 
were sworn in and patrolled the streets at night 
in pairs, one with a rifle and the other with a 
revolver. At first they were very energetic, 
and it was "Halt, who goes there? Advance 
one at a time and give the countersign" at about 
every hundred yards. After a week or two they 
quieted down a bit, but are still fairly lively, 
particularly if you are in a cab driving at night. 

After the Dronfield fight on October 24th 
nothing happened in the War Department for 
a long time, but I was pretty busy medically, 
and a case of smallpox developed down in Bea- 
consfield which made rather a scare, but the 
man and his friend who shared his room were 
promptly taken out to the Lazaretto and no fur- 
ther cases developed. 

On the 31st we received our first intimation 
that the Boers had got some artillery with them, 
as they fired some shots from a field gun at a 
patrol of our men which was out in the Free 
State direction to the north-east of Kimberley, 
but no one was hit. On November ist about 



24 BESIEGED BY THE BOERS 

2 P.M. we heard a tremendous explosion, and 
on looking about saw a huge column of smoke 
to the north over the dynamite magazines, so 
we guessed that the Boers had blown up the 
De Beers stock of dynamite, and this afterwards 
turned out to be true. This d>Tiamite had been 
stored in the town, but the town council got 
scared that if the bombardment took place and a 
shell struck it, it would blow the whole town 
to bits, £0 they had it removed some distance 
out. The De Beers people used to fetch in 
what they wanted every day, but on this same 
morning the Boers had fired on them when they 
were going out, and so they had to return with- 
out any. The Company was very angry with 
the town council about this, because they said 
that they could have kept the dynamite with 
perfect safety inside the town limits by divid- 
ing it up into small lots and keeping these in 
separate places. The mines had to be shut 
down very soon after this for want of d}Tia- 
mite, but it did not really make much differ- 
ence, as they ran short of fuel only a few days 
after. On this same day, too, we started on 
brown bread by military order. There was a 
far larger stock of coarse meal than of flour 
in the tovrn, so the colonel ordered the making 
of white bread to cease, and all the bread to 
be made of three fourths meal and one fourth 



FIGHTING AND RAIDING 25 

flour. On the second a smaller dynamite maga- 
zine was blown up, but it only made a very 
small explosion compared with the first one. 

On this day a Jewish patient of mine amused 
me very much. He had a store out at Wind- 
sorton, but he and his family lived in Kimber- 
ley. He had managed to get out to his store 
to see how things were going on, the Boers not 
interfering with him beyond frightening him 
with their boasting. They told him that they 
had shelled Mafeking and killed everybody in 
it, and that they were going to do the same for 
Kimberley. He came straight back to fetch his 
wife and family out to the store "for safety," 
though his wife had been confined only a fort- 
night before. He must have been badly scared, 
for he said the Boers had commandeered £ioo 
of goods from his store, but "that was noth- 
ing." For a Hebrew to callfioo nothing means 
that he is out of his head with terror. I asked 
him what the Dutch said of the Dronfield fight, 
and he replied that they had told him they had 
killed forty English, wounded one hundred, and 
captured one hundred and fifty horses. 

"You know yourself," I said, "that four were 
killed and twenty-five wounded that day, so 
how can you believe them in other things when 
they lie so frightfully about the things you do 
know?" To my great surprise, he decided to 



26 BESIEGED BY THE BOERS 

stay in town, but I did not at all expect he 
would be so sensible. 

The next day, November 3d, was a very 
anxious day. The alarm sounded at 10 a.m., 
the Boers again trying to raid the Kenilworth 
cattle, but after a good deal of long range firing 
they were driven off, only one man of ours 
being wounded. The men had just got in when 
another attack seemed likely on the opposite 
side of the town. There was pretty heavy fight- 
ing there for a couple of hours, and we got 
our first sound of artillery fire, our guns back- 
ing up our mounted men and blazing away well. 
Between them they managed to drive the Boers 
oft", with two men on our side wounded. Dr. 
Watkins got a man wounded through the right 
lung, who ultimately did quite well, and I got 
a poor chap who was shot in the side of the 
head, and who died on the operating table as I 
was seeing if anything could be done for him. 

The sanitary system here is a pail system; 
all the closets have pails, and these are taken 
away and fresh ones put in every other night. 
The full pails are carted away in big covered 
vans, that always remind me of the menagerie 
vans that used to come through Garton on the 
way from Roos to Aldborough. There are a 
good many of these vans, and they take a lot 
of oxen to draw them. The work is done by 



FIGHTING AND RAIDING 27 

short-sentence native prisoners under proper 
guards. Vans, oxen, and natives, in fact, the 
whole plant, are kept at a big compound a mile 
from town. On this afternoon the Boers made 
their attack from this quarter, and began by 
raiding all the vans and the oxen that pulled 
them. This looked like altogether disorganis- 
ing the sanitary service, and in the afternoon 
edition of the paper (a piece the size of a single 
sheet of note-paper, price 3c?.) a request was 
issued to all householders to dig holes three 
feet deep in their gardens or yards and empty 
their pails into them, adding a covering of 
earth. This looked all right, but how to dig 
a three-foot hole when eighteen inches brought 
you down to solid rock, as it does in some parts 
of the town, was not explained by the authori- 
ties. Then again, for every man who would 
carry this scheme out properly there would cer- 
tainly be ten who were too idle or careless to 
bother about it. On the face of it this plan 
was no good. I did my own scavenger work 
for one day, but the sanitary contractors soon 
managed to carr}^ out their work with another 
plant, and so this difficulty was tided over. 

On the next day everything started quiet, 
but the De Beers steam ''hooter" sounded at 
noon because a party of Boers was hovering 
round Wesselton in a threatening way. Our 



28 BESIEGED BY THE BOERS 

people dropped a few shells about them, and 
they concluded that they did not want Wessel- 
ton as badly as they had thought. On this day 
(November 4th) we heard of the twelve hun- 
dred men in Natal who had pursued the Boers 
too far and been obliged to surrender when 
their ammunition gave out, and very sick we 
felt about it. I also heard of the packet of 
dynamite that had been found under the big 
bridge in the centre of the town. A policeman 
approaching the bridge had noticed some men, 
who scuttled away as he came near, leaving a 
parcel behind them which turned out to be dyna- 
mite. As a matter of fact, unless a hole had 
been drilled deep and the dynamite properly 
sunk in it there was not enough to burst the 
bridge. But it showed plainly what we all 
knew well, that we had traitors in the camp. 

When the trouble first began and martial law 
was proclaimed a court-martial was established. 
Its members were partly army officers and part- 
ly civilians. The civilians were the Resident 
Magistrates of Kimberley and Beaconsfield, the 
Civil Commissioner of Kimberley, and one of 
the High Court Judges. This court tried all 
people who broke the martial law provisions, 
such as those who were out after hours without 
permit, who broke through the barriers or had 
arms in their possession illegally, or who were 
in any way in communication with the Boers. 



FIGHTING AND RAIDING 29 

In theory the constitution of the court seemed 
all right, but in practice it was absurd. The 
military members were too full of more impor- 
tant work to attend, and so the civilians had it 
all their own way. They were all men who had 
to do with civil law cases, and consequently 
Vv^ere always wanting minute and conclusive evi- 
dence before they convicted a man. That is 
all right in civil work, but is no use in a case 
like ours. What Vv-as wanted was a court of 
men who knew no law, but understood common 
sense. A court like this would have decided 
that if there was the shadow of suspicion 
against a man it would be safe to jail him out 
of harm's way until the siege was over. But 
this court was ruled by the superior officer of 
the others in ordinary times, and most offenders 
were dismissed with a caution. Everybody 
was very disgusted with the court in conse- 
quence. On one occasion some men were seen 
on a debris heap waving flags to the Boers, 
while they (the Boers) were actually firing 
shells into the town. The police arrested the 
men, and then this extraordinary court asked 
the police whether they could positively swear 
that their captives were the men who waved 
the flags. As the heap was half a mile off, of 
course the police could not swear to them, so 
they were dismissed with the usual caution. 
On this same day (November 4th) there was 



30 BESIEGED BY THE BOERS 

a rumour that the Boers had sent an "ulti- 
matum" to the colonel, that if he did not sur- 
render in twenty-four hours they would bom- 
bard the town. Whether true or not this yarn 
was widely believed, and many people expected 
the shelling would begin at daybreak on the 
sixth, but it did not. They fired two shells at 
sunset at Wesselton mine, and we thought we 
were in for a night bombardment. The hoot- 
ers sounded and every one turned out to his 
post, but nothing happened. This was the last 
we heard of the hooters, and everybody was 
glad of it. It was a weird, ghastly sounding 
alarm, and scared nervous people out of their 
senses, so the colonel stopped it and instituted a 
cone alarm, like a wind cone on a pier, but so 
far I have never seen it. The hooter was the 
same one that was used to tell the miners their 
time, and we were used to two blasts from it 
when the shifts changed three times a day, but 
the three blasts frequently repeated during this 
part of the siege fairly gave one the horrors, 
especially at night. It will be a long time be- 
fore we forget those three blasts, and when 
things are settled and we start our usual two 
again it will be some time before we give tip 
pricking up our ears and listening for the third 
hoot when we hear the first two. 




SEARCH AND SIGNAL LIGHT AT WESSELTON. 



CHAPTER III 

THE BOMBARDMENT BEGINS 

Our long-expected bombardment began on the 
next day, November 7th, and it was a feeble 
business. The Boers fixed a gun on a kopje 
about four miles out Spytfontein way, and com- 
menced trying to shell us. They fired about 
twenty in all, and no damage whatever was 
done. A very few, only two or three, reached 
the town, and they fell in the street and no 
injury whatever was done either to people or 
property. The gun was so far off that we could 
not hear much of a report when it was fired, and 
the shells burst with an insignificant noise, that 
is, when they did burst at all, the majority of 
them being defective. The corruption of the 
Boer Government had recoiled on itself, and 
whoever supplied the shells had supplied ap- 
parently an inferior quality of old explosives, 
charging, no doubt, full price for them. Re- 
port says that some of the shells which did not 



32 BESIEGED BY THE BOERS 

burst were filled with sawdust instead of pow- 
der, but I do not know whether this is really 
true or not. One shell fell in the street where 
my office is, but about one hundred and fifty 
yards higher up. It is said to have exploded 
within a few yards of an Irish policeman, but 
all the notice he took of it was to remark, 
"Fwhat will they be playin' at next?" For the 
truth of this, however, I will not be responsible 
either. Several of these shells fell not far from 
the house of a patient of mine, which is in a 
prominent position and easy to see from a dis- 
tance, but the lady of the house sat quietly on 
the veranda without turning a hair, being 
rather amused than otherwise. She gave me a 
chunk of one of the shells as a memento. 

Next day we were awakened before six by 
three cannon shots which sounded very close, 
and after the shot we could hear the shell ex- 
plode each time, so we thought that the Boers 
had got hold of a better lot of shells and really 
meant business this time, but it turned out after- 
wards that it was our own guns firing. 

On the ninth Agnes started with influenza, 
and had to give up her refugee work at last. I 
was very busy and could not look after her 
much myself, so I got a nurse to attend to her, 
and she recovered in a few days. The tenth 
was a quiet day. No bombarding took place. 



THE BOMBARDMENT BEGINS 33 

But the armoured train was fired on by the 
Boers as it attempted to reconnoitre to the 
northward. Next day, the eleventh, we had a 
pretty hot time. The Boers had brought their 
guns nearer and to a different position, and 
began shelHng at 5.15 a.m. They had got the 
range by this time, and almost every shell 
landed in the town. I had to go out early to 
a case, and went down into the main road oppo- 
site the end of the house and stood talking there 
to a friend who had been watching the shells 
falling farther up the town. I was only out 
about a quarter of an hour, and had just got 
into the garden when I heard the Boer cannon 
fire, and in a few seconds the unmistakable 
*'whiz" of the shell, followed at once by its ex- 
plosion, let me know that the trouble was 
mighty near. I went out to see where it had 
burst, and found it was in the main road close 
by. One piece struck a Kaffir woman on the 
back of the head and knocked her brains out, 
and she fell on the pavement and died in a few 
minutes, not a hundred yards from our house 
in a straight line, in Dutoitspan Road near the 
Club. Another woman who was walking with 
her was not touched. Another piece of the 
shell cut a thick branch off a tree exactly where 
I had stood talking to my friend a quarter of 
an hour before. This was getting near with a 



34 BESIEGED BY THE BOERS 

vengeance, and I did not at all like it, as our 
house stood a good chance of getting hit, being 
two storied, while all the others around it were 
only one story high. However, though they 
shelled away for two hours in the morning and 
two more in the afternoon, nobody else was 
touched, and no other shell came as near as this 
one. After this the Boers kept their guns in 
the same position and fired at us in a half- 
hearted sort of way every day (except Sunday) 
for a whole week. We had shells in town on 
the 1 2th, 13th, 14th, 15th, 1 6th, 17th, and i8th. 
They generally began soon after daylight and 
went on for an hour or two, till they got tired 
or possibly till they knocked off for breakfast, 
and they usually recommenced for an hour or 
two in the afternoon. During the seven days 
of active bombardment they fired at least seven 
hundred shells into the town, and the amount 
of damage done both to life and property was 
so small that it would hardly be believed. 

Besides the Kaffir woman, no one was killed, 
but a Dutchwoman died of fright when a shell 
burst near her house. A Dutchman, too, was 
driving a fare in his cab when a shell dropped 
on his horses, killing one outright and breaking 
his own arm but not damaging the fare in the 
least. One morning early I was rung up and 
an unmistakable Hebrew voice yelled up my 



THE BOMBARDMENT BEGINS 35 

speaking tube, ^'Corne down at once ; a shell has 
went through my arm." It was not probable 
that he had much arm left after this, but I found 
that it was only a splinter of the shell after all. 
He had been lying in bed and a shell dropped 
through the roof and burst in his room, a small 
piece of it going through the fleshy part of his 
arm, without touching the bone. Another man 
was said to have been grazed by a splinter on 
the same day, and this is the sum-total of the 
personal damage done by all those shells. On 
the other hand, the narrow escapes were numer- 
ous, and some of them were miraculous. One 
day a shell came into the Queen's Hotel. It 
just missed the dining-room, where thirty peo- 
ple were at lunch, and dropped into the pan- 
try adjoining it. As luck would have it there 
were no waiters in the pantry just then, but 
there were two cats, both of which were killed 
and the crockery smashed. I believe one man of 
the thirty stayed to finish his lunch. On an- 
other day, when the shells were falling near the 
house of a patient of mine, he and his daughters 
went to the front door to see what was hap- 
pening. A shell came through the end of the 
house, across one room, through the wall, across 
the passage, through another wall, and into the 
bowels of a piano which was standing up against 
the wall, and there burst. It crossed the pas- 



36 BESIEGED BY THE BOERS 

sage within eight feet of the people, not one 
of whom was even scratched. Another shell 
came through a roof into a room adjoining a 
bedroom where a patient of mine was lying ill, 
and exploded there without doing him the 
slightest injury. I have a piece of this one to 
make a brooch for Agnes. 

One shell fell in an office on the chair 
where a man had been sitting writing not a 
minute before. Another fell in Dr. Mathias' 
front garden, just in front of a window while 
he and two other men were having lunch inside. 
Another fell on the footpath in front of a to- 
bacconist's shop in the main street at a most 
frequented corner, and burst without even 
breaking the window. Another went through 
the English Church. Another wrecked a small 
house where one of the club waiters lived, but 
as the house was in a rather hot corner for 
shells he had removed his family and furniture 
only the day before. All the time this shell- 
ing was going on it was rather nervous work 
getting to one's patients in the part of the town 
where the shells were falling. Most of them 
came from the same direction, and if you were 
on foot when the gun went off you had plenty 
of time and knew just where to shelter, but 
driving about was different, as you did not hear 
the gun, the rattle of the cart hiding the sound. 



THE BOMBARDMENT BEGINS 37 

One day I was coming across the Market 
Square when they were firing, and I suddenly 
saw a puff of smoke and cloud of dust in the 
middle of the street about one hundred yards 
in front of me, where a shell had burst. As 
several had landed in the same neighbourhood, 
I turned up a side street, as I did not want to 
get my head caved in. Lots of shells fell in 
our forts, but we put up bomb-proof shelters 
in them, and not a man was touched. Eighteen 
fell into one little fort in one afternoon. Our 
men got quite expert in dodging the shells. 
You heard the gun boom, and a few seconds 
after the "whiz" of the shell came, and you 
ducked close under a wall or earth bank or shel- 
ter of any sort that was handy till the shell 
burst; immediately afterwards every one in the 
neighbourhood tore frantically towards it to 
pick up the pieces, for which there was a ready 
sale, and good pieces, such as the bottom or the 
conical point with the brass fuse in it, would 
fetch from one to two pounds. It was really 
laughable to see the shell hunters on the look- 
out when the firing was hot, and tearing up to 
the place where the shells burst to collar the 
bits. In more than one instance lawsuits were 
threatened over the ownership of such pieces of 
a shell. 

Finding how little damage was done, we 



38 BESIEGED BY THE BOERS 

soon began to treat the bombardment with calm 
indifference, and on the hottest days shelHng 
did not create the alarm that even the hooters 
used to do. We became quite learned in shells, 
too, and talked glibly of shrapnel and ring 
shells, and time fuses and percussion fuses, and 
all the rest of it. The one they were most lib- 
eral with and which we got to know best was 
the ring or segment shell. This was about 
seven inches long, three inches in diameter, and 
bluntly conical in shape. It consisted of a pipe 
of rings like cog-wheels, but with a large space 
in the centre, the cogs being held together only 
by very narrow bridges of iron. They are 
made of very brittle cast iron, piled one on top 
of another to the required height, the top ones 
getting gradually smaller to give the necessary 
conical shape. Round this pile a thin coating 
of iron is cast, and then the incomplete shell is 
smoothed off in a lathe, leaving a smooth thin 
coat of cast iron holding the cogs in position. 
The hollow in the centre of the cog-wheels is 
then filled with gunpowder, and just before it 
is fired the fuse is screwed into the point. This 
point is a brass tube about three inches long 
and about as thick as an ordinary candle. In- 
side it contains a percussion cap with a spike 
so arranged that it fires the cap when the nose 
of the shell strikes anything hard. There are 



THE BOMBARDMENT BEGINS 39 

two copper bands round the shell. The one 
near the base we found to be corrugated, a fact 
due to the rifling in the cannon; the other one 
is quite plain. These bands fit themselves to 
the grooves in the gun, being soft metal and not 
damaging it as the iron would do. The cor- 
rugated one is the one we make brooches of. 
When the shell bursts the cog-wheels are sup- 
posed to split up into the separate cogs, and 
these should in theory ''spread death and de- 
struction on all sides." As practised by the 
Boers, however, they seem to be a particularly 
harmless sort of firework. Our artillery offi- 
cers tell us this is because the Boers are using 
their guns at the extreme range to which they 
will carry, and that if they used them at two 
thirds the distance we should be anything but 
amused by them. The powder inside the shell 
is only enough to burst the case, but not to hurl 
the fragments apart with any degree of force. 
If, however, the shell bursts while it still has a 
high velocity the pieces go on with the same 
velocity, and are very dangerous. 

Shrapnel is designed on a different plan. It 
does not have to strike to cause explosion, but 
is arranged to burst in the middle of its flight, 
and instead of cog-wheels contains several hun- 
dred bullets, which scatter and really do con- 
siderable execution. But these shells are very 



40 BESIEGED BY THE BOERS 

much heavier than the other kind on account 
of the bullets, and so will only travel about half 
the distance that the others do, therefore though 
a few were fired when our men were out near 
the Boers, I don't think any ever reached the 
town. 

When first there was any rumour of trouble 
with the Transvaal the government persistently 
denied that anything of the kind was possible, 
and all through steadily refused to let guns or 
police or ammunition or soldiers come up to 
Kimberley. In fact, they hindered any defence 
preparations here in every way they could. As a 
result, our regular soldiers are less than six hun- 
dred in number, and the best guns we have are 
seven pounders (i.e., the weight of the shell they 
throw is seven pounds). The Boers have all 
sorts of guns, even up to one hundred pound- 
ers, though the largest they have used against 
Kimberley has been a twelve pounder. The 
range of the gun increases with the weight of 
the projectile, and so the result is that the 
Boers can place their guns well out of the reach 
of ours, and throw shells into the town with 
perfect safety. Our men are too few to sally 
out and take their guns, but whenever our guns 
managed to get within range of the Boers their 
firing was splendid — far and away more accu- 
rate than theirs. If we had had two fifteen 




BOER SHRAPNEL SHELL, WITH TIME FUSE. 



THE BOMBARDMENT BEGINS 41 

pounders not a shell would have ever come into 
the town, and if we had had two thousand men 
instead of seven hundred no siege would have 
ever taken place. 

All the bombardment of the town came from 
the north-west, and the people who lived in that 
quarter were advised to come into the town 
out of reach of the shells. They took up their 
quarters in schools and halls and other avail- 
able places, and were overcrowded and gener- 
ally uncomfortable. After a week of it they 
decided that the comforts of their own homes, 
even at the risk of being killed by the shells, 
were preferable, and so all of them, except a 
few of the most nervous, w^ent back. 

To be safe they dug pits in their gardens or 
back yards, and roofed them with firewood or 
old iron and put a couple of layers of bags, full 
of earth on top, and then piled loose earth on 
the top of these, so that when any shelling began 
they could take shelter in the pit and be safe. 
Numbers of people had to turn out of their 
homes on account of the siege, as they lived 
outside the line of forts and so were liable to 
be shot by our own people as well as by the 
Dutch in case of attack, and might be rushed and 
looted at any time even when there was no gen- 
eral attack. All the Kenilworth people came 
into town early in the siege, and are still un- 



42 . BESIEGED BY THE BOERS 

able to go home (it is now December 7th). 
Then the natives who Hved in two outside vil- 
lages were turned out and sent to a place within 
the forts, as their kraals were liable to give cover 
to an attacking force, and their huts flattened 
out and destroyed. In several instances good 
houses were razed to the ground for the same 
reason, and in front of one fort all the garden 
fences, etc., were cut down, so that the Boers 
could not dodge behind them in case of attack. 
On the whole, our people took very thorough 
precautions when the war really did begin, but 
many still say that if the Boers had attacked 
a week sooner they could have taken the town 
with the greatest of ease. 

All this has brought me no farther than No- 
vember nth, the day on which the bombard- 
ment really started. On that day our men (the 
cavalry, that is, for infantry are no use against 
mounted Boers) went out and had a brush with 
the enemy. One of ours was killed, and from 
subsequent native reports we think several Boers 
were slain. But our men were at a disadvan- 
tage, as they always were in these sorties, for 
all round the town the bush had been cleared 
and the Boers could see them coming and take 
cover and wait till they got within range, and 
then blaze away. If the enemy could have 
plucked up courage to attack the town our men 



THE BOMBARDMENT BEGINS 43 

would have been under cover and the Boers in 
the open, but that is not in the least their style 
of tactics. 

None of us liked these sorties, as they ex- 
posed our men too much, and as the Boers 
would not give them an opportunity to get at 
them, so we had to take a chance now and then 
to prevent them getting too aggressive. Noth- 
ing else happened until the fourteenth, when 
there were rumours of an ultimatum from the 
Boer commandant to Colonel Kekewich, giving 
him twenty-four hours in which to surrender 
the town, or he would bombard it. At the time 
we hardly believed this, but later on it turned 
out to have been quite true, as in a Dutch paper 
w^hich was found on one of the prisoners whom 
our men took later on there was the full text of 
the commandant's letter and Kekewich's reply. 
The latter was to the effect that if the com- 
mandant wanted Kimberley he had better come 
and take it, and, further, that as the Boers 
had been using the white flag treacherously, 
the officers had orders to fire on all such flags 
in future. This was because the Boers, with 
their usual deceit, had been using the white 
flag to get into better cover and to take other 
unfair advantages of us. In the first fight they 
sent a white flag out, and when one of our 
men went out to meet it the Dutchman asked 



44 BESIEGED BY THE BOERS 

how many men there were out on our side, 
were they police or volunteers or regulars, and 
many such unlawful questions. Naturally, our 
men told them to go to devil and find out, but 
the Dutch took advantage of the parley to take 
up a better position. 

Again when our ambulance waggons were 
out bringing in the wounded at any of the 
fights, I think I am correct in stating that the 
Boers invariably fired at them when they were 
within range, though each waggon carried the 
red-cross flag. 

On the sixteenth our men had another brush 
to the north-west, one of them being killed and 
ei^ht wounded. I only got one of the wounded 
this time, as it was early in the morning and 
the message to fetch me got muddled some- 
how, so I was a little late at the hospital. My 
man had four holes in him, all from one bullet. 
It went through the outer side of his left thigh 
and through his left hand, too, which was rest- 
ing on his thigh at the time, but only one of 
the small bones of his hand was broken, so he 
was soon all right again. On the seventeenth 
I had rather a slack afternoon, so we got Dr. 
Stoney to show us over the forts to which he 
was doctor up at the Waterworks Reservoir. 
When we arrived the shells were dropping near 
the reservoir, so we went out on the veldt to 






1- '/I.* 



i 




THE BOMBARDMENT BEGINS 45 

one side of it and looked on a long way off at a 
brush which was going on in another direction. 
Our men were out and trying to draw the 
Boers, but as usual they did not succeed. Our 
seven pounders were on a debris heap and were 
firing over the heads of our men at the Boers, 
who were far away, hidden in a water-course. 
The rifle firing was tremendous, almost entirely 
from the Boers as we learned later, and it sound- 
ed as if there would be a great many wounded as 
a result, but such was not the case. Only one 
of our men was hit in the calf of the leg — not 
a serious wound. Whether any Dutch were 
killed we did not know, in fact, that was a thing 
we never did know. The Dutch papers we se- 
cured from time to time gave full accounts of 
several of these skirmishes, and generally said, 
*'our loss was one man slightly wounded, but 
the English suffered tremendously." In an out- 
of-the-way corner would be the notice, "Franz 
De Beers, who was killed in the fight at Kim- 
berley on such a date, was the son of so and 
so." This occurred more than once in the same 
paper. Certainly the Boers were smart in get- 
ting away their killed and wounded, but of 
course they were in their own lines. They did 
not advance to meet us as a rule, but let us go 
to them, which is part of the usual Boer tactics. 
They say, too, that the Boers remove their dead 



46 BESIEGED BY THE BOERS 

by the primitive and crude method of putting 
a rope round the bodies and dragging them off 
at a gallop behind a horse. 

After watching the fight I have been speaking 
of, we went on to the reservoir, as the firing 
had ceased. We saw the guns and shells, and 
the officer in charge explained them to us. 
There has been more firing at the reservoir than 
at any other place, either because the Boers 
want to disable our guns or to burst the reser- 
voir tank and let out the water. Many shells 
have fallen harmlessly into the water, and some 
even have struck the bank, but nobody was hurt. 
The guns are intact, and the reservoir is as 
sound as it was. 



CHAPTER IV 



WITH C. J. RHODES COMPLIMENTS. 



M 



About this time the De Beers Company began 
to turn its attention to the making of shells. 
We had a very good supply, but not knowing 
how long we were going to be shut up the Com- 
pany thought they might as well be making 
some, and very well they succeeded. Their 
shells, though perhaps not so nicely finished as 
those turned out at Woolwich, gave every satis- 
faction to our artillery officers. Each shell 
was stamped "with C. J. R.'s comps." The 
Company turned out about sixty a day, so we 
had no fear that shells would run short. Ever 
since we were shut in we kept hearing all sorts 
of rumours as to the date when our relief col- 
umn would arrive. Even after three days we 
had "reliable" news that it was at Modder 
River, but as time went on these reports became 
more and more inaccurate. Every one had 
"definite information" as to the date when it 



48 BESIEGED BY THE BOERS 

would arrive, and every one's date was differ- 
ent. At last we came to the conclusion wc 
would expect it when we saw it. Things went 
along quietly without much happening. Most 
days there was a little shooting between our 
patrols and the Boers, generally without any 
damage being done, and at other times a few 
shells were fired either at the people guarding 
our cattle or at Wesselton. We had got used 
to these shells and did not mind them much, 
but on some days, when the wind was in the 
right quarter, the report of the gun and "whiz" 
of the shell sounded very close. 

Our bedroom faced the quarter from which 
most of the shells came, and sometimes when 
the guns woke me up and sounded very close 
I used to think they were too near to be pleas- 
ant. Downstairs in the hall even if a shell had 
come into the house I don't think it would have 
touched us, as it would have had to pierce two 
good brick walls, which I did not think possible 
at the range from which they were fired. 

On the twenty-fourth Agnes and I had quite 
a little excitement. I heard from Mackenzie 
that the men in one or two of the forts were 
loaded with all sorts of presents from the towns- 
people, but that those in out-of-the-way quarters 
had been neglected. I laid in twenty pounds 
of Transvaal tobacco and two hundred cigars, 



"RHODES' COMPLIMENTS" 49 

and went round to these forts. At one of them 
that looked north we had quite a bit of fun. 
The men were very poHte and showed us every- 
thing, a Maxim gun amongst others, and ex- 
plained the way it was worked. We had some 
field glasses with us, and could see the Boers 
moving around the veldt about a mile and three 
quarters away between their head camp and 
the railway. 

Presently the armoured train went out, and 
the Boers fired a gun at it. The gun was about 
the same distance from us as from the railway 
and they fired across us, so we could see the 
shots well. They fired six shots at the train, 
but only one went near it. Then they fired a 
last shot, and this time they had swung the gun 
round and fired at our fort. Of course it was 
too far off for us to see how the gun pointed, 
but we saw the flash and puff of smoke, and 
heard the whiz of the shell evidently coming our 
way. We did not have much time to think, but 
the men all yelled to us to crouch down behind 
the rampart, and the shell struck and burst 
about one hundred yards away, but quite harm- 
lessly. Then a message came from the conning 
tower that every one was to leave the fort, 
except those actually on duty, so we had to 
take our departure. 

Later on in the afternoon I went up to the 



50 BESIEGED BY THE BOERS 

top of the conning tower and had a look round. 
There is a splendid view from there, but I only 
had a few minutes to spare and it is necessary 
to be up there hours to take in all the country 
round. Things look so different from such an 
elevated point as this. When the trouble is 
over I will go up and spend an afternoon there 
with a glass, and take in everything quietly. 

On the next morning (November 25th) we 
were awakened about five o'clock by heavy gun 
firing, and soon after heavy rifle firing began, 
so I knew there would scon be some wounded 
about. I got up and went down to the hospital 
about six, and Watkins turned up soon after. 
We waited about a little, and then, as there was 
no news of any wounded, were just going off to 
a bit of high ground near the hospital to see if 
we could see anything of what was going on. 
Just then a telephone message came to say that 
we were to go out to where the fighting was go- 
ing on, as more doctors were wanted. It did not 
seem the right order, as we knew that there 
would be wounded coming in presently, and our 
allotted post w^as at the hospital; however, it 
was an order, so off we went. Watkins had a 
bicycle, but mine was out of order and I was 
walking. I walked along without meeting a 
conveyance of any sort, till at last I got hold of 
a milk cart, which took me about a quarter of 
a mile, and then at length I found a cab. 



"RHODES' COMPLIMENTS" 51 

I went out as far as I could go, and came up 
after a while with an ambulance. We got a 
little way beyond the barrier when I met some 
of our men coming in with about a score of 
Dutch prisoners. 

A little farther on I met some more of them, 
and the men who were bringing them in told 
me that I ran a danger of being shot if I went 
further out. However another ambulance was 
still ahead, so on I went after it. The rifle 
firing had been falling off a good deal, and by 
the time I caught the ambulance it had prac- 
tically stopped. Three or four ambulances 
were just starting for the hospital, and every 
one seemed to have been attended to, but they 
brought a Boer along with a bad wound in his 
head, and I bandaged him up and sent him back 
in one of them. 

The ambulances were on the road just under 
the crest of a hill, and a good lot of our men 
were scattered on both sides of the road also 
under the brow of the hill. Dr. Watkins was 
somewhere about. I saw his bicycle on the 
roadside, but could not see him. After wait- 
ing for a little time orders came from the 
colonel that our ambulance vv^as to move off to 
the left, keeping under cover of the hill, so we 
went along over the veldt for a few hundred 
yards, and then a pretty smart rifle fire began 
again, directed at the men near whom we were. 



52 BESIEGED BY THE BOERS 

Then we got an order to draw off home with the 
ambulance, as our men were going to retire. 
This being the case, I did not see that I was 
doing any good there, and I knew that a lot of 
wounded had gone along to the hospital, where 
there was only the junior house surgeon left 
to receive them, Russell having gone out with 
the army doctor to see the fun. So I concluded 
to get back to the hospital as soon as I could. 

I took a bee line across the open to my cab, 
a little exposed to the fire that still continued. 
Five or six bullets whistled over me, probably 
not aimed at me at all, but I have no doubt they 
would have laid me out quite as effectually if 
they had hit me in the right spot. These small- 
bore bullets made a tiny little whiz, more like a 
big mosquito than anything else, and did not 
sound as if they could possibly hurt. 

I got back to the cab all right and went 
straight along to the hospital, and found, as I 
had expected, a great quantity of wounded and 
no one to look after them. I set to work at 
once, and Watkrns and some more of the doc- 
tors soon turned up, so we got them ship-shape 
before long. I had some bad cases this time. 
One poor youngster of eighteen Vv^as shot in the 
abdomen, and his bowel was cut open about ten 
times. I had to cut one piece about ten inches 
long clean out and to stitch up a lot of other 



"RHODES' COMPLIMENTS" 53 

places, but I felt that he had no chance and sent 
for his people, and told them so at once. He 
died about six hours after. His father and 
mother had left when the war scare began, but 
he would not go. He stayed and joined the 
Light Horse. 

Another man fell to me with a badly broken 
arm, the bone being very much shattered, and 
another with a bullet clean through his liver. 
Another had a bullet in his thigh, which I cut 
out and have kept, together with a big bullet 
I picked up on the veldt. Our loss was six 
killed and twenty-nine wounded, but we be- 
lieve that the Boers lost very heavily, and we 
took thirty-five prisoners. I forgot to say that 
two badly wounded Boers fell to me at the hos- 
pital, but I did not bother about them much 
until I had seen to our men. Both of them 
were rather severely hit, but they did well and 
were not long in the hospital. As soon as they 
were able to get up I had them transferred to 
the jail hospital, as they could easily escape 
from the big hospital. The man whose head I 
bandaged up on the field was seriously damaged. 
In fact Shield said that when he took off my 
bandage about a third of the man's brains fell 
out, and this is very nearly the absolute truth. 
Even at that, he lived three days. 

The result of the day's fight was that our 



54 BESIEGED BY THE BOERS 

men drove the Boers off the ridge from whicK 
they had been shelHng the town, with heavy 
loss, but as strong re-enforcements of Boers 
came up they very wisely retired and did not 
attempt to hold the position. 

Watkins got out a few minutes before I did 
and was right up in the firing line while the 
fire was still very hot, but he came out all right. 
Some well-known men were hit in this fight. 
One poor chap (he is one of the three men who 
rent my old house) got the middle part of his 
lower jaw smashed into splinters. It is a hor- 
rid wound, not dangerous to life, but I am 
afraid the deformity will be very bad. 

Most of the Boer prisoners were of the very 
lowest class, and came from Bloemhof, a little 
Transvaal town not far from Christiana, where 
I have been several times. Two, at least, of 
them came from Barkley West, where they had 
been working in some relief work that the gov- 
ernment had started for the benefit of poor 
whites. Some of these prisoners had Free 
State newspapers on them which gave us later 
news than any we had been able to get. 

These papers printed a letter from the com- 
mandant who was bombarding Kimberley in 
wdiich he said he had aimed his shells at the 
middle of the town to **do as much damage as 
possible." 



"RHODES' COMPLIMENTS" 55 

This, like firing on ambulances, is directly 
against the Geneva Convention, which stipulates 
that bombardment should as far as possible be 
confined to fortifications and not include pri- 
vate buildings. But the Boer cares for none 
of these things ; he is little better than an igno- 
rant savage, and knows and cares nothing for 
conventions. 

On the whole, this was a good day's work, 
though we lost rather heavily. It showed, how- 
ever, that the Boers were not always invincible, 
even behind their earthworks. 

The next day a doctor came in from the 
Boers for chloroform and brandy. He was a 
Scotchman, and said he had been compelled to 
go with the Boers, which is hardly believable, 
as he could have stayed in Kimberley if he had 
wanted to when he was here. One of our men 
knew of him and said he was the biggest scoun- 
drel in the medical profession, but he got his 
chloroform and brandy. 

On the twenty-eighth we had another fight. 
When I came in to lunch I found a note from 
the captain of the ambulance corps asking me 
to be ready to go out with the ambulance at 
3.30 P.M., as our men were going out in force. 
I wrote a note to say he might count upon me, 
but ran across the man who he said had told 
him to write to me. In the course of conver- 



56 BESIEGED BY THE BOERS 

sation I said that I should be there on time, 
and he asked me what I meant. When I ex- 
plained he was surprised, and said I must stay 
at the hospital and not go out, as he had got a 
reprimand for sending Dr. Watkins and myself 
away from our post a few days before. I was 
a bit disappointed, but of course had to obey 
orders, and as it turned out I did not miss much. 
All the afternoon there was lots of firing, both 
rifle and artillery, but no wounded turned up. 
About 7.30 we got news that the wounded were 
coming in, so I went down to the hospital. 

Dr. Mackenzie had been somewhere watching 
the fight, and came in with glowing accounts 
of the way in which our men had attacked the 
Boers, stormed their fort, taken their big gun, 
and done great things. This was good news, 
but when the wounded began to come in we 
heard another tale. The first few said we had 
lost heavily, but knev/ no details. Others ar- 
rived who told us that Colonel Scott Turner, 
who commanded all the mounted men, was 
killed (with many of his officers), and that we 
had not taken the gun or fort or accomplished 
what we had planned. 

The wounded kept straggling in by ones and 
twos, and now and then an ambulance brought 
more, and so it went on until about 2.30 a.m., 
when the last one was finished. Altogether 



"RHODES' COMPLIMENTS'' 57 

about thirty wounded were treated, but I got 
only six of them, for after attending to a few 
Watkins got a man who was shot through the 
bowels and asked me to help him. It was a 
worse wound even than I had had with my own 
similar case a few days previous, and took 
nearly two hours to attend to. The poor chap 
only lived about twelve hours. 

We got home to bed about three, and were 
glad to get a little rest. Next day was a very 
sad day, for by this time we knew that we had 
lost a lot of men, exactly how many we did not 
know till the Boers sent in to say they had nine- 
teen of our dead and we could fetch them, and 
so we did. The total loss was twenty-two 
killed at the time, and two died after in hos- 
pital. The nineteen were so badly cut up that 
there was some ground for the rumours that 
after our men had retired the Boers had gone 
round and finished off any wounded who were 
still alive. They had been very near the Boer 
fort, and this fact might account for the sever- 
ity of their wounds, but nobody knows except 
the Boers. The colonel was shot dead quite 
close to the fort leading on his men. He was 
a very brave man but rash, and though the 
townspeople were a good deal upset at his death, 
there was a curious undercurrent in his own 
men's sorrow. They all felt that he was reck- 



58 BESIEGED BY THE BOERS 

less, and likely at any time to endanger all their 
lives for the slightest reason, or rather for no 
reason at all. Of course they all knew that any 
of their sorties were very risky, but Turner al- 
ways seemed to go in for unnecessary risks, 
and the men naturally did not like it. 

All the dead were buried on the Wednesday 
afternoon (November 29th), and the whole 
town was gloomy. It is said that Scott Turn- 
er's orders were to attack the Boer position 
and do what he could, but not to press the at- 
tack on the fort itself, as that would be too 
costly. Turner, however, could not restrain 
himself, and went for the fort in spite of orders. 

In one of the Boer positions which our men 
took they captured one hundred and fifty shells 
of a very deadly kind, seven barrels of gun- 
powder, and a few other things, but the price 
we paid for them was far too heavy. On that 
same Wednesday night we got signals from the 
relief column that they were coming along. 
From this time things were pretty quiet, and 
there was no further firing into the town. Most 
of the Boers were supposed to have gone down 
to meet the column, but they left enough to pre- 
vent our men doing much, but no actual fight- 
ing took place until December 9th, when our 
men went out to the Homestead and had an 
artillery fight with the Boers at Kamfersdam. 



"RHODES' COMPLIMENTS" 59 

There was a great deal of firing, but not much 
damage was done. One of our men only was 
killed and two wounded, all these by the bullets 
from shrapnel shell, which are just like those 
I used to make with a mould at home. 



CHAPTER V 

MILITARY ECCENTRICITIES 

About this time the military began to worry 
us with proclamations. First we all had to 
report how many horses we had, and a few days 
later there was a notice that horse owners might 
use the horse feed they had, but when that was 
done none would be issued except for horses 
used for military operations. Fortunately my 
stableman had a fair supply. Then there was 
trouble about condensed milk; none was al- 
lowed to be sold except on a doctor's order, 
and then only for infants and sick people, and 
one wrote more orders for milk than prescrip- 
tions about this time. 

We had been for some time on an allowance 
of meat. At first it was not very strictly ad- 
hered to, but now it began to be doled out in the 
regulation quantity. We were very lucky, for our 
butcher used to send us ours the same as usual, 
but he was the only butcher allowed to have 



MILITARY ECCENTRICITIES 61 

meat by the military, and most people had to 
wait their turn. As nearly all of the men in 
town were in the town guard, the women often 
had to try to get the meat allowance for them- 
selves, and were often shoved out of the way 
and did not get any. There was a great deal 
of grumbling about the meat supply, and as 
there was plenty of cattle it seemed as if a bet- 
ter allowance could be made and a better sys- 
tem of distributing arranged. I suppose, of 
course, the military officers did their best to 
arrange all these things, but as there were not 
many of them they had their hands very full. 

As time went on, however, dissatisfaction 
rose in the town as to the way the officers con- 
tinued issuing orders that were all very well 
from their point of view, but not at all calcu- 
lated to promote the welfare of the townspeo- 
ple. A military officer is so concerned with 
his own importance that he never considers any 
view of a matter other than his own. Person- 
ally our officers were very genial people, but 
as a body they appeared to believe that Kim- 
berley was made for the especial benefit of their 
regiment. 

After this, except for rumours about the ap- 
proaching column, nothing happened until the 
9th of December. On that day our artillery 
went out to the Homestead and tried to shell 



62 BESIEGED BY THE BOERS 

the Boers out of a strong position they had 
taken up in one of the outsides mines — Kam- 
fersdam — but though the two parties blazed 
away at each other for a long time, not a great 
deal of damage was done, only one of our men 
being killed and three slightly wounded. The 
Boer loss was two killed and a few wounded, 
and we did not drive them from their position. 
On Sunday, the tenth, a little distant firing 
was heard late in the afternoon, and it was re- 
ported that a few shells had been seen bursting 
on the Spytfontein hills, where the Boers were 
massed in strong force, having evidently been 
fired by the relief column. On the next morn- 
ing heavy cannon firing began before five 
and kept on till after nine. It was tremendous, 
just like volley firing with cannon. A dozen 
reports would come in quick succession, the 
whole of them perhaps in less than a minute, 
and for about four hours this sort of thing was 
almost incessant. Some of the shells could be 
seen bursting in the same kopjes as on the pre- 
vious night, but whether the bulk of the noise 
was from our guns or the Boers' we did not 
know. Of course, after all this we were confi- 
dent that our column would come in in the af- 
ternoon, but of course it did not. And though 
I am now writing on December i6th, and all 
this took place five days ago within twenty 



MILITARY ECCENTRICITIES 63 

miles of here, the outside world knows far more 
of what happened than I do. As our column 
has not arrived we imagine that the Dutch posi- 
tion was too strong for our men to force. 

We are all mighty sick at the lack of news. 
Whether the officers have any or not we do 
not know, but at all events the civilians know 
nothing. It was not until sixteen days after 
the fight at Modder River that we were allowed 
to read extracts from the despatches. We don't 
want to know the plans of the general, but we 
can't help wanting to know something of the 
things that have happened. I suppose the 
army red tape forbids anything being told to 
civilians until it is too old to interest them. 

The military orders on one occasion towards 
the end of November contained the interesting 
information that on October 6th a company of 
the town guard went out to the rifle butts to 
practice, and returned after they had finished. 
Another day the item was that mule No. so- 
and-so, belonging to the Royal Artillery, had 
died and was accordingly struck off the strength 
of the regiment from the date of its death. 
Then again a few nights ago when the search- 
lights were signalling, an important message 
was sent through, and all concerned strained 
their eyes to get hold of it rightly. When got 
it read, "What is the number branded on the 



64 BESIEGED BY THE BOERS 

hoof of the horse issued to O' ?" O' is 

the mihtary doctor, and he has not heard the 
last of that horse yet. 

After the heavy cannonading on the eleventh 
everything was deadly dull for a time. A few 
distant guns were heard on the twelfth, and 
now and then the Boers dropped a few shells 
into Wesselton, but beyond this there was no 
news and nothing doing outside. Inside there 
was great excitement, for somehow a rumour 
got around that a proclamation would be issued 
to the effect that all women and children, and 
all men not actually bearing arms or in some 
other way indispensable to the defence of the 
town, would be compelled to leave Kimberley 
as soon as the railway w^as opened. A notice 
v/as printed that free passes on the railway 
would be given to people not able to pay the 
fare to wherever they wished to go, and 
this gave some colour to the story. Any- 
how, though there was no official notifica- 
tion that any such scheme was contemplated, 
it was known that such a plan had been de- 
bated by the town council and the military, and 
later on that the colonel had received positive 
orders from headquarters to carry it out. The 
reason was that as the railway from here to 
Orange River (eighty miles) ran through what 
was practically enemy's country, it would 



MILITARY ECCENTRICITIES 65 

need to be guarded all the time, or the Boers 
would rip it up again. To efficiently guard that 
length of line would need an enormous number 
of men, for unless almost every yard was looked 
after carefully a single Boer could creep in and 
take out a rail or two and so disorganise the line 
again. As any great number of men could not 
be spared for long, the authorities saw that 
there was a choice of two things, either to bring 
up food to Kimberley, or take Kimberley to 
the food and then let the line look after itself. 
Naturally, being officials, the wrong thing 
seemed right to them, and they seem to have 
decided to take Kimberley to the food. This 
was very well in theory, but when you consider 
that all the colonial towns, Cape Town as well 
as others, were already overcrowded with refu- 
gees from up country, the hotels and boarding- 
houses being crowded, it seemed to our people 
that in leaving Kimberley they would be going 
from the frying pan into the fire. Then again, 
many people who were struggling along here, 
only just able to make both ends meet, would 
be hopelessly ruined by leaving. 

The railway notice said that no excess lug- 
gage would be taken, and this meant practi- 
cally that the people would have to go with what 
they stood in. It was a foolish notion, and 
the very mention of compulsion irritated the 



66 BESIEGED BY THE BOERS 

people. Had there been any attempt to carry 
out the compulsory exodus, I firmly believe 
there would have been civil war in the town, 
and that would either have resulted in surren- 
dering the town to the Boers or in telling the 
military to get out and leave us to look after 
ourselves. One man told the colonel in almost 
so many words that if our own countrymen 
were going to turn us out of the homes we had 
earned and worked for, surrender to the Dutch 
could not possibly bring anything worse upon 
us. Anyhow, feeling ran very high, and the 
whole town was aroused. To do our colonel 
justice, I believe he saw the absurdity of the 
proposal, but he had his orders and could not 
go against them, though he did not actually 
hurry to carry them out. Had he been able to 
publish a proclamation when the scare began, 
to the effect that hard times were coming and 
that it was advisable for all people who were 
able to do so to leave the town, and that every 
possible assistance and facility would be given 
to them to do so, but that no compulsion would 
be used, none of this feeling would have arisen. 
1 suppose that this would have been flying too 
directly in the face of the orders of his superiors, 
and so could not be done. Anyhow, a very 
strong protest was sent off by Rhodes and other 
important people, showing the folly of compel- 



MILITARY ECCENTRICITIES 67 

ling the people to leave, and for the present the 
matter stands over till our relief column arrives. 

It is pretty generally thought that the de- 
spatch which Rhodes and some other prominent 
men sent off some weeks ago urging that im- 
mediate relief must be sent to us caused the 
issue of the compulsory departure order, the 
authorities at the Cape or at home thinking the 
matter to be more pressing that it really was. 

At present, however much any one wants to 
get away there are no means, so it can't be done. 
All the week (December nth to 17th) we have 
been longing to hear some news of the column's 
advancing, but not a syllable of news has 
reached us. Rumours are plenty, the favourite 
one being that the Boers hold a very strong 
position in the Spytfontein kopjes, through 
which the railway runs. Our men failed to 
shell them out, so now it is said that the next 
move will be to try to surround them in the 
kopjes and cut off their food and water sup- 
ply, at the same time bringing the railway 
round the kopjes either on one side or the other 
in spite of the Boers. It sounds feasible, the 
country to the east of the kopjes being pretty 
level for a railway, but it is rather a big order, 
and would apparently take a long time. 

To-day (December i8th) we had news in the 
paper of the big fight on the eleventh at Spyt- 



68 BESIEGED BY THE BOERS 

fontein, and our guesses were not far out. 
There was a heavy engagement there and we 
lost heavily, as any attacking force must always 
do when advancing in the open against a strong- 
ly entrenched enemy. The column did not suc- 
ceed in turning out the Boers, but inflicted a 
heavy loss upon them, possibly heavier than 
our own, but of that we cannot be sure. How- 
ever, an irregular force feels the loss of its 
men far more than a regular one. We hope, 
therefore, that the Boer loss has been great 
enough to discourage them a little, but this we 
shall find out later. 

Whenever we have had a little opportunity 
to think of others than ourselves we have won- 
dered how Mafeking was getting on. We have 
had news at long intervals, but generally much 
to the same effect — viz., that heavy bombard- 
ment is still going on. It is wonderful how 
that little place has held out, and we would give 
anything to help them to continue their resist- 
ance until they are relieved. If they are able to 
do so, I think their defence will be one of the 
pluckiest in history. They have been shelled 
almost the whole of the siege, and our shelling 
has been the merest child's play to theirs. The 
Boers have never used anything heavier than 
a twelve pounder against us so far, and at Mafe- 
king they have used forty, sixty, and even a 



MILITARY ECCENTRICITIES 69 

hundred pounder, and yet those chaps have 
hung on, and keep getting a few Boers here 
and there when they have a chance. Fortu- 
nately, they were well supplied with food at the 
beginning, and got most of their women and 
children out. 

December 24th. — All the last week things 
have been quiet. Our men have been out a few 
times and a little shooting has been done on 
both sides, but we have had no one hit. The 
Boers are leaving us alone, and both sides are 
awaiting developments. Our men cannot attack 
the Boers, as their position in the kopjes at 
Spytfontein is too strong. The Boers cannot 
leave Spytfontein without permitting the relief 
column to get into Kimberley, so apparently we 
are just sitting looking at each other. In the 
meantime the Boers are leaving Kimberley un- 
molested, and are even dismantling the forts 
from which they shelled us earlier in the 
war, probably taking the sandbags to fortify 
other positions from which to harass the 
column. Our men are doing all they can to 
make these old positions untenable by filling up 
the wells and cutting the dams, so that if they 
do reoccupy them their water supply will be a 
problem to them. We hear now that the Spyt- 
fontein commandos are in difficulties for water, 
which is very likely. V/e hear, too, that typhoid 



70. BESIEGED BY THE BOERS 

and dysentery are decimating their numbers, 
which is also likely, for the average Boer has 
no idea of military sanitation. We ourselves, 
in spite of all precautions, are getting our share 
of these troubles, so that the Dutch must be 
having a great deal of difficulty with them. 

On the twenty-first we had another sad mis- 
hap. A corporal of the mounted police, after 
going round and inspecting his outlying pickets, 
went off towards the Boer lines without saying 
anything to his men. They did not see him go, 
and consequently when they made out a man 
some four or five hundred yards spying about 
and scouting they fired at and killed him. It 
was just getting dark, and as he had not warned 
his men no one could be blamed. It was abso- 
lutely his own fault, but it is very sad to kill 
one's own men all the same. There is no doubt 
now that a man who was unaccountably shot 
earlier in the siege when out scouting met his 
death by his own men. 

We have not had any cheerful news about 
our forces in the Colony and in Natal this week ; 
in fact, they all seem to be in trouble. To the 
non-military man who knows something of the 
country all three columns seem to be running 
their heads against stone walls when they try 
to turn the Boers out of the hills in Natal, at 
Stormberg, and at Nauwpoort. Many of these 



MILITARY ECCENTRICITIES 71 

hills are almost unscalable, and to try and take 
these in face of a strong force armed with maga- 
zine long-range rifles seems the height of folly. 
The plan that commends itself to the common 
sense civilian mind is to keep a sufficient force 
at these hilly places to prevent the Dutch ad- 
vancing into the Colony and then to send a col- 
umn into the Free State through the flat coun- 
try anywhere between here and Orange River. 
However, I hope those in charge of the move- 
ment really do know what they are about. At 
present it seems as if when they had spelt South 
Africa they had come to the end of their knowl- 
edge. 

We have now been cut oflf for ten weeks, and 
seem just as near relief as we were at the be- 
ginning. Personally, I have not felt the nip 
much, because I have a good balance at the 
bank and all our tradespeople know that we are 
good payers, so we can buy when other citi- 
zens cannot. Soon after the siege began we 
started quietly getting in stores, and we are 
pretty well supplied, so that I think we could 
last out a month quite comfortably; even six 
weeks, by economy, although we could not buy 
a thing in town. I fear the bulk of the peo- 
ple have not been so prudent. Many of them 
got quantities of provisions, but began to con- 
sume them directly the siege began, which is 



72 BESIEGED BY THE BOERS 

the worst sort of foolishness. So far we have 
not touched any of our reserve, and even keep 
adding to it Httle by little as we can. There 
is some talk to the effect that we may be re- 
quired to hold out till the end of January, and 
for all that I can see this is true. 

It is beginning to be very hard now for in- 
fants and invalids, as there is very little food 
to be got of the sort they ought to have. Most 
of the milk farms just outside the town have 
been looted and the cattle driven off by the 
Boers, so that there is hardly any fresh milk to 
be had, and no great stock of the condensed 
article on hand. The military are husbanding 
the latter as carefully as they can, but I don't 
see how it can last very long. No one can buy 
a can of milk without a doctor's order, which 
has to be countersigned by the military officer 
in charge of all stores. Most of the doctors are 
careful to give orders only in emergency cases, 
but there is one who gives more orders than 
all the rest of us put together. I expect he 
makes the people pay for his orders, and gives 
them indiscriminately. 

All this time w^ork has been pretty brisk. Dr. 
Fuller got cut off, as I have previously ex- 
plained, so I have a few of his best patients, 
and besides this there is a lot of sickness about. 
The men keep moderately well because most 



MILITARY ECCENTRICITIES 73 

of them are in the town guard and are out in 
the forts, where they get more fresh air and less 
whisky than usual. But a good many contract 
fever or diarrhoea or dysentery, the last two 
because of the coarse food and the quantity of 
water they drink on the hot days. This makes 
a great deal of work, but it is not paying work. 
Early in the winter Mackenzie and I decided 
that we would treat all members of the defen- 
sive forces free, unless their illness was due to 
drink or other indiscretion. It did not seem 
fair to charge these men for our services when 
many of them were actually risking their lives 
in the defence of the town, and though I think 
we were the first to start this all the other doc- 
tors quickly fell into the same way. But there 
was considerable paying work, too, among the 
women and children, the latter especially giv- 
ing us a great deal of trouble. At best young 
children die here with great rapidity in the hot 
weather, and the unsettled state of affairs of 
course makes things worse than usual this year. 
Then, too, quite half the number of patients 
go to the seashore for December and January, 
and they can't get away this year. On the 
whole, the amount of paying work has been a 
good deal larger than usual this season. But 
collections are hard for several reasons. First 
of all, Dorward, our collector, is in the town 



74 BESIEGED BY THE BOERS 

guard, and gets very little time off, and then 
we have told him to send in accounts only to 
such people who can well afford to pay. Even 
if he were at liberty as much as usual we should 
not expect him to go around collecting as he 
usually does. The people have too much on 
their hands to be worried for doctor's money 
just at present. As long as we can make 
enough to live on we shall be satisfied for the 
present. 

December 26th. — Christmas over once more 
and relief as far off as ever. Early in the siege 
those who wanted to be really funny talked 
about relief reaching us at Christmas time, and 
we all thought then that this was a joke, but 
the jocular part does not seem quite so funny 
now. Christmas day was very quiet, even more 
so than the one I spent on the North Sea. 
There we had sufficient excitement when we 
found that the leg of pork we had been saving 
for Christmas had gone bad, but even that was 
denied us here. We did not expect our ducks, 
for which we paid £1, to be anything very much, 
and in this we were not disappointed. We had 
Dr. Stoney and his brother to dinner, and I 
think they enjoyed themselves in a quiet way. 

There have been rumours that a great fight 
was going to take place at Spytfontein, but 
nothing has happened. To-day there have been 



MILITARY ECCENTRICITIES 75 

rumours that Plumer has got down from Bula- 
wayo and relieved Mafeking, but that is too 
good to believe until properly confirmed. There 
have been reports of another sort for the last 
few days — viz., that the Boers have captured 
a train full of lyddite and other ammunition 
somewhere between Orange River and Spytfon- 
tein, and this is so bad that it probably is true. 
We have no doubt that the Boers will be de- 
feated in the end, but at present most of the 
signs point the other way. We in Kimberley 
are hoping a good deal from Sir Charles War- 
ren. He has been up here before, and knows 
both the country and the Boers, but whether he 
will come this way or not is very doubtful. 
There are many men here who served with him 
before, and they have great belief in him. 

We had a Christmas message from Sir Al- 
fred Milner. He did not wish us a merry 
Christmas but a lucky one, and we appreciated 
the wording of the message. 

Yesterday we had a new proclamation, to the 
effect that no one should kill or cause to be 
killed any ox, cow, bull, sheep, lamb, goat, kid, 
or pig without permission. So things are get- 
ting rather tight. Our next door neighbour 
has a small red pig (looks like a Tamworth) 
about six weeks old that runs about his yard. 
It seems too funny that he should not be able 



7g BESIEGED BY THE BOERS 

to kill this small swine without getting a per- 
mit. I suppose the idea is that people who kill 
at home will not be allowed meat from the 
butcher till they have eaten their share. 

The Boers have been shelling Wesselton mine 
again to-day, but I don't think they have done 
any damage. It must be a bitter disappointment 
to them to find that we have managed a decent 
water supply after they cut us off from the 
river. Of course they know about our getting 
water from Wesselton, and I suppose they keep 
hammering away there in the hope that they 
may burst the pumps, but as the machinery is 
all in the mine I don't think they have a very 
good chance of doing so. However, the more 
they shoot the better, for modern guns don't 
stand an unlimited amount of firing, as the 
rifling wears away, particularly in the heavier 
ones. 

December 31st. — Very little in the way of 
war has happened since I wrote last. On sev- 
eral occasions we have heard distant firing, so 
our relief column is either shelling the Boers 
or being shelled, which we don't know. To- 
day there is a rumour that our men have taken 
Scholtz Nek, which is an important point held 
by the Boers, not far from Spytfontein, but 
we have not had this confirmed yet. The paper 
has been for the last few days full of stories to 



MILITARY ECCENTRICITIES 77 

the effect that the War Office and England is 
waking up to the fact that the war is a far more 
serious business than they imagined. This is 
very reassuring, but one can't help feeling indig- 
nant at the way we are kept cooped up here, 
no fresh steps being taken to help us out as far 
as we know. We had hoped that Warren 
would come up this way, but to-day I hear he 
has gone to Natal. 



CHAPTER VI 



THE FOOD PROBLEM 



Of course we all know that Kimberley is merely 
a pawn in the game, and that it does not much 
matter to England what becomes of us. But 
it matters a good deal to us. Wq are now 
about to feel the real nip of the siege. Last 
week we had a proclamation that various neces- 
saries, such as flour, meal, bread, rice, sugar, 
etc., would in future only be issued in stated 
quantities, and that only to the holders of per- 
mits. To get a permit for any one of these 
things we must make a declaration as to the 
quantities of all of these articles which we have 
in our possession, and not only that, but also 
declare the quantities of every kind of provi- 
sion which you had. So in order to get a little 
sugar we have to give the military a list of 
everything we have. I have no doubt they keep 
a record of those things and will requisition 
them later on. 

This seems all right in theory, but having 



THE FOOD PROBLEM 79 

myself been one of the provident ones I don't 
at all appreciate the idea of being looted for 
the benefit of the improvident. 

The only article we wanted was bread. We 
had a good store of flour, but did not care to 
bake for ourselves if we could help it. I went 
to Major Gorle, the head of the food-supply ar- 
rangements, and proposed a compromise to him. 
My bread allowance came to about twenty 
pounds a week, so I offered to give his baker 
twenty-five pounds of flour a week in exchange 
for that amount of bread, the extra flour to pay 
for labour and fuel. I thought it seemed a fair 
offer, but I suppose he thought it would be a 
bad precedent, for he declined to accept it. 
He offered, however, to supply me with bread 
as long as the siege lasted if I handed over all 
my flour to him in a lump. This I declined 
to do, for he cannot know how long the siege 
will last, and though my flour vvould be a drop 
in the ocean for the whole of Kimberley, it will 
last me quite three months. So as soon as our 
baker gives up supplying us with bread we shall 
start baking our own. 

As for meat just now we are at a loss where 
to turn for fresh supplies, for the butcher has 
given notice that he will not be allow^ed to sell 
to us after to-day, as the military are going to 
take over the meat supply to-morrow, but so 



80 BESIEGED BY THE BOERS 

far these latter have not made their method 
of procedure public. Vegetables are also very 
scarce. The authorities have taken over the 
regulation of them, and as usual have made a 
bad muddle of it. Yesterday they advertised 
to supply vegetables at a certain place from 
6 A.M. to 10.30 A.M. Agnes suggested that she 
should go and get some, but I, knowing some- 
thing of the crush there would be, prevented 
her. I went myself at a little after six o'clock, 
and found the street full, so I came home and 
did some gardening, and I afterwards heard 
that nothing was sold till nearly eleven o'clock. 
After this I don't look forward with any keen 
enjoyment to the military administration of the 
meat supply. We can get a little green stuff 
out of our own garden, enough to keep us from 
getting scurvy, but not much more. When the 
water was cut off by the Boers we were not 
allowed to water our gardens (though many 
people have done so), and as we imagined the 
siege would not last longer that a month we 
did not worry about the vegetables, but tried 
to keep our fruit trees and vines alive. 

Now, however, when it begins to look as 
though we were to be shut up for all time I 
am going to cultivate my vegetable garden 
again. I have succeeded in getting one of the 
borough water carts to bring me two loads of 



THE FOOD PROBLEM 81 

water a week. The water supply comes from 
the De Beers Company. The managers have 
to pump a lot of water out of the mine, and 
have laid on a big pipe to the nearest street and 
practically any one can get water who wants it. 
The cart holds about four hundred gallons, and 
I have some tanks and barrels to store it in 
during the days between the' loads, so I shall 
get on all right. Of course the water is very 
hard, but it is better than none. 

I have put in potatoes, lettuce, dwarf beans, 
peas, mustard and cress, and Indian corn this 
week, and have just got some tomatoes up in 
the greenhouse to be transplanted presently. 
Beet is the best thing of all to grow here. It 
grows well, and you can take the outside leaves 
off time after time just as we used to do with 
the wurzels at Carton for the cows. When the 
leaves are boiled you can't tell them from 
spinach. 

At last the Dutchman has been decently sen- 
tenced for communicating with the Boers. He 
lived far out at Wesselton, and on two occa- 
sions was seen after dark to leave his house, 
the last one in the village, and go in the direc- 
tion of the Boer rifle pits, not returning for sev- 
eral hours. He could have no possible busi- 
ness in that quarter at that time, so he must 
have been communicating with the enemy. The 



82 BESIEGED BY THE BOERS 

judge wanted to give him a year, but the other 
members of the court declared that they would 
sit forever unless the sentence was three years 
to hard labour, so eventually the judge gave 
way and the man was sentenced. 

The Dutch lawyer, of whom I have written 
before as having bolted from here the day be- 
fore we were cut off, was captured by Meth- 
uen's people some weeks ago, and is now in 
jail at Cape Town. Rumour says that when 
caught he was in an office telegraphing some 
information to the Boers, but the truth is not 
known. Now he keeps writing to his relatives 
asserting his innocence, and they publish his 
letters. He says he was arrested by the Boers 
as he was suspected by them, and that being 
a leading Bondsman he was suspected by the 
English. When he is tried I have very little 
doubt his Boer friends will swear that he was 
arrested by them, but Kimberley will never be- 
lieve that, whatever the court does. 

I hear to-day that the Pretoria Boers are very 
confident as to what the end of the war will 
be. They say that when England sues for 
peace their terms will be Natal, Bechuanaland, 
and Griqualand West to be given up to them, 
and any other parts of the Colony in which the 
majority of the inhabitants wish to be under 
the Dutch flag. They will also demand the 
payment of twenty millions. 



THE FOOD PROBLEM 83 

We hear that Roberts and Kitchener are com- 
ing, or, rather, are already on the way, and 
large numbers of troops of all sorts, but it is 
an anxious time. Try as I will, I don't find I 
can take my usual amount of interest in the 
work, and as to settling down to read profes- 
sional literature, that is quite out of the question. 

January 5th. — Very little has happened since 
the last entry. On several days the Boers have 
fired a few guns at our patrols or the cattle 
guard, and one shell came into the town and 
went through an inhabited house two days ago 
with the usual result — no one hurt. We hear 
that the Australian contingent drove the Boers 
out of Douglas on January ist, and to-day there 
are rumours that they have done the same at 
Barkley West, but I hardly think this will be 
confirmed. But if nothing military has been 
happening, we have had plenty of other distrac- 
tions. On the first of January the new procla- 
mation about meat came out. The butchers 
had to cease selling at their shops, and the 
whole arrangement was taken over by the mili- 
tary. The new allowance was a quarter of a 
pound for adults and two ounces for children 
under twelve. 

The meat was to be distributed in the new 
Market Hall, and the three wards that formed 
half the town were to go there to be served at 
one side, and the three of the other half on the 



84 BESIEGED BY THE BOERS 

other. This was for white people only; col- 
oured folks and natives had a separate place 
each in a different part of the town. Railings 
were put up at the sides of the Market Hall 
with three gates, and each ward formed up in 
front of its own gate in a two-and-two string, 
four people entering at a time. The day before 
the new arrangement began every householder 
had to send in a notice stating the number of 
adults and children that there were in his fam- 
ily and the quantity of meat he wished to draw, 
so that when he applied for his supply his de- 
mand could be checked from the list made out 
from all the requisitions. He was then given 
a numbered card, with the quantity he was en- 
titled to stamped upon it and properly signed 
so that in future he would just have to show 
this card and there would be no further bother. 
The distribution began at 6 a.m. on the third. 
Agnes wanted to go and fetch our supply, but 
I did not care for her to do so; but I had been 
out in the night and was tired, so we neither 
of us went that day, as we had enough meat 
on hand. Being the first day, all the arrange- 
ments were strange and the tickets had to be 
made out, so that it took a long while. But 
it was better than the previous indiscriminate 
fighting. Next day I went about 6 a.m. and 
found I was pretty late, crowds being there 



THE FOOD PROBLEM 85 

before me. I came near the tail of the 
string. My ward, No. 2, and another, No. 6, 
are each of them quite three times the size of 
any of the others, so these wards were not half 
done when the others were all served, and we 
were consequently at a disadvantage. I took 
over an hour to draw my pound of meat that 
day. All dealings are for cash, gd. a pound 
being the fixed price. 

The officer in charge of all food matters, 
Major Gorle, is an intelligent man, and saw at 
once that it would not do to put the two big 
wards in a worse position that the small ones, 
so for the third morning he arranged that the 
two big wards should draw two days' supply 
one day, and on the next day the four small 
ones should do the same. This course hur- 
ried things up a good deal, for half of the peo- 
ple had to be served every day instead of the 
whole of them. That day I left the house 
about 5.30, and was back very soon after six. 
Vegetables are to be given out in a similar way 
twice a week, but I have not been on a "vege- 
table day" yet. 

The present arrangement is very good, the 
elimination of natives and coloured people and 
the presence of a few police and soldiers makes 
everything quite orderly, and, but for the te- 
diousness of waiting your turn, fairly comfort- 



86 BESIEGED BY THE BOERS 

able. Inside the hall the meat is laid out on 
the tables ready cut up and carefully weighed 
into one-, two-, three-, and four-pound lots. 
When you show your ticket the man sees in a 
minute how much you are entitled to and hands 
it over. There is nothing that a lady need 
object to in the whole business now, so I shall 
let Agnes go if I happen to be out on the days 
we want our supply. 

We are allowed to send another white per- 
son, servant, or otherwise to fetch our rations, 
but he or she will have to take his turn just 
like the others. We are also allowed to send 
a coloured or native servant, but these have to 
wait till the whites present are all served, so that 
expedient is not good enough or we should 
send John. Our white servant is too stupid to 
trust, so one of us has to go. 

It is very funny to see all the town's best 
people either fetching their meat themselves or 
sending a member of their families for it. Par- 
sons, lawyers, doctors, business men, we are all 
there, and it is a huge joke that we are all in the 
same boat, though it is to be hoped the joke 
won't last too long. Previous to this we have 
all thought that as long as there was a decent 
balance at the bank nothing could go far wrong, 
but now we find that the balance is of very 
little use. We can only buy necessaries, and 



THE FOOD PROBLEM 87 

these only in strictly defined quantities, not too 
liberal. As for luxuries they are either not to 
be had at all, or else only on production of a 
medical certificate. Unless, therefore, you have 
a private stock of luxuries, or other things inter- 
mediate between necessaries and luxuries, you 
have to live very sparely and monotonously. 
The system of permits is a great nuisance to 
the doctors. Every patient, whether rich or 
not, considers that his circumstances are such 
that he is entitled to have a permit from you to 
buy milk, butter, stout, cheese, oatmeal, mutton, 
extract of beef, etc. We are between the devil 
and the deep sea. On the one side the patients 
clamouring and getting offended if they don't 
get permits for everything they fancy, and on 
the other Major Gorle making trouble if we 
send in too many. Most of us only give them 
in cases where we feel sure that the applicant is 
actually suffering in health for want of the food 
demanded. But some of the doctors are either 
very soft-hearted or easily imposed upon, or 
more likely think to curry favour by giving 
permits indiscriminately. Milk (condensed) is 
the chief thing wanted, and the stock is none 
too great, so we have to be careful. 

The Boers have raided most of our milk 
cows, so fresh milk is very scarce, but there 
is some, and we are among the lucky ones who 



88 BESIEGED BY THE BOERS 

still get ours. You would think that the mili- 
tary would have asked the doctors to hold a 
meeting and decide what to do about permits 
for milk and other things, giving us a rough 
idea of the amounts in stock and the daily 
amount it was safe to issue, but such is not the 
case. So far the authorities have given us no 
instructions whatever, and within the last three 
days they have told me that the total available 
amount per day is twenty tins, Watkins that it 
is forty, and Mackenzie that it is twenty-five. 
You can't work with figures like that. The 
colonel is half inclined to commandeer all the 
fresh milk and issue it only to infants and in- 
valids. This would be rather a good plan, as 
it would save a lot of the condensed milk and we 
should then have a reserve in case the milk cows 
had to be killed for food. We should miss our 
fresh milk, but would gladly give it up if we 
were sure that it went to the right people when 
we had done so. At present if we did it would 
probably go to some one who needs it no more 
than we do. Many of the people are very good 
about the milk. The De Beers Com.pany sup- 
plies the hospital with a great deal, and just 
now they are sending a good deal to Agnes for 
free distribution am^ong the sick and poor. She 
is a leader in the Benevolent Society, and so 
knows who is deserving. One patient of mine 



THE FOOD PROBLEM 89 

has a cow of his own, and after keeping a mod- 
erate supply for his own children he allows me 
to use the rest for any one who needs it, free. 
Every one, however, is not so good. Some 
genius who did not care for black tea or coffee 
struck the happy idea of getting in some of the 
tinned infants' food, which contains milk, and 
using that as milk. This, however, did not last 
long, as I expect the fact of young single men 
buying babies' food led to enquiries. Anyhow, 
one of the parsons told me of it, and I went 
straight off to Gorle to suggest the comman- 
deering of all infants' food and found that he 
had already done so, so he is pretty wide awake. 
To-day (January 7th) I got my supply of vege- 
tables when I got my supply of meat, so con- 
sidered myself lucky. The quantity was for half 
a week for four people, and consisted of a bunch 
of five carrots, none of them big, four small 
parsnips, and nine beet-roots, none of them as 
big as a big radish. Price, i^. But one gets 
a few little presents or is able to buy small 
quantities of vegetables and fruit from people 
who have wells in their gardens and so are inde- 
pendent of the water supply. To-day Macken- 
zie bought a lot of beautiful peaches for himself 
and me at ij^.y. each. Agnes says I am to 
say that eggs are 6s. 6d. a dozen. Butter is a 
thing of the past, except in tins, and that is ob- 



90 BESIEGED BY THE BOERS 

tainable only by means of a doctor's certificate. 
We had several lots of fresh butter from a pa- 
tient long after it was impossible to purchase 
it. She had a child down with scarlet fever, 
and consequently was afraid to send the butter 
to her brothers' and sisters' families for fear 
of infecting them, but for all that I offered to 
buy her surplus. She refused, but gave me 
about a pound several times. Of course I paid 
her back with honey or sweets or something of 
that sort for her children. 

On January ist we were delighted to find a 
notice in the paper that the w^ater would be 
turned on for watering gardens on and after 
Tuesday, January 2d. I found the tap would 
run on the first, so I stole a day and gave all 
my garden a fine soaking. Having been so vir- 
tuous all those weeks and not used a drop of 
tap water unnecessarily I felt easy in my mind. 
Now we thought we should be able to grow 
all sorts of vegetables, and so planted a quan- 
tity of seeds. I also put in a patch of barley 
to cut green for my horses. It was only a 
little patch, but still it will be a help. I put in 
some mealies, too (better known outside the 
Transvaal as Indian corn). When they grow 
up the green stems and leaves are good fodder 
for horses. I already had in a few plants of 
sweet mealies, such as the Americans call sweet 



THE FOOD PROBLEM 91 

corn or pop corn, and I added to the number. 
I got the seed from Gardener WilHams, who, 
you will remember, is the general manager of 
the De Beers. He is an American, and a first 
class one, too. But, alas, on Friday a new no- 
tice appeared that no gardens were to be wa- 
tered, under the same pains and penalties as 
before. This was bad, but as the taps seemed 
inclined to run still I w^atered on the sly Friday, 
Saturday, and to-day, Sunday (January 8th). 
But I have talked the thing over with one of 
the water-works men and the military officer 
who is responsible for the water supply, and 
they give very good reasons why the gardens 
cannot be watered, so I shall relapse into virtue 
again, and use tap water only for necessary 
domestic purposes. I mean, however, to give 
up the little bath we have been using and use 
my big bath, with a fair amount of water. 

The reasons why we can't water our gardens 
are these : All our water supply now is pumped 
from Wesselton Mine, and the daily supply is 
250,000 gallons, whereas the daily consump- 
tion, without watering any gardens, is 300,000 
gallons. When the water-pipes from the river 
were cut off by the Boers our reservoir was 
full, but the difference between supply and con- 
sumption lowers it about half an inch a day, 
so if the siege lasts long enough the reservoir 



92 BESIEGED BY THE BOERS 

will in time become empty. Another reason 
is that the Dutch are always shelling Wesselton, 
so one day they may happen to drop a shell into 
the pump and then good-bye to our water. The 
pipes from Wesselton run a long way outside 
our line of defences, and the Boers could cut 
them easily enough if they knew just where 
they ran and had the pluck to come and do it. 
If either of these things happened, the water 
in the reservoir would be the last we should 
get, so it is wise to keep it as full as we can 
without actually stinting ourselves for neces- 
sary water. When the water was on we 
thought we were going to do great things in 
the gardening line and grow almost enough 
vegetables to keep us going. We put a lot of 
seeds in, but whether we shall manage to keep 
them going is another matter. Green stuff for 
horses being very scarce, I put in a little patch 
of barley and a lot of mealies in the trench down 
which the water runs. The mealies when cut 
green make good food for horses. 



CHAPTER VII 

HORSE FOR DINNER 

Forage is a big difficulty just now. The mili- 
tary give us doctors a forage allowance, dry 
mealies principally, but nearly all the cabs have 
stopped for want of forage, and the trams are 
going to be stopped next week I hear. There 
are no horses for the milk or bread carts. 
Everybody has to fetch his own. Presently 
there will be no carts in the place except for 
the military, the doctors, and the undertakers. 
January loth. — At last we have begun to feel 
the siege a little more acutely. On Monday the 
people who went for meat were told that they 
could only take half their allowance in beef, the 
other half must be taken in horse-flesh or else 
gone without. Lots of people went without. 
We are not compelled to kill horses just yet, 
but as forage has become so scarce plenty of 
horses which are now in fair condition must be 
turned out on the veldt, and there they will 
soon become very poor. The authorities there- 



04 BESIEGED BY THE BOERS 

fore very wisely decided that they had better 
be eaten before this happened, and so started 
to kill them off. Somehow one does not quite 
relish the idea of eating horse, but it must be 
simply because one has not been used to doing 
so ; the horse is a clean enough feeder, and ought 
to be all right. Monday was not my meat day, 
but I went along on Tuesday and took my share 
of horse-flesh like the rest. By the way, I had 
managed for the first time on that day to get 
a meat ticket which allowed me to go in the 
exit door and get my allowance at once with- 
out waiting. I had not before tried to do so, 
as I did not want to take an unfair advantage. 
But I found that a few people were getting 
these tickets who certainly had not such good 
reasons for wanting them as I had, so I went 
in and got one, too. I brought my allowance 
of horse home, and that night we had it for 
dinner. If I had not known what it was I am 
sure I could not have told it from beef. It 
was tender and good enough for anything, but 
all the same it took some good will to eat it, 
and I did not take a second helping. I guess 
I am not hungry enough yet. 

January 14th. — There is a very good story 
going around about the horse-flesh, and though 
I don't know whether it is true or not it ought 
to be. Colonel Peakman, who is in command 



HORSE FOR DINNER 95 

of all the mounted men, Cape Police, Diamond 
Fields Horse, and Kimberley Light Horse, is 
here. The first day horse-flesh was served out 
some of it was cooked for the officers' mess at 
the mounted camp. At the table Peakman said, 
"Gentlemen, I am sorry to say that we were 
unable to get all our ration in beef to-day, and 
had to take part of it in horse-flesh. This which 
I am carving is beef, the horse is at the other 
end, and any one who prefers it can help him- 
self." Nobody did prefer it, and so they all 
ate beef and made a good dinner. When they 
had finished Peakman suddenly said, ''By Jove, 
gentlemen, I find I have made a mistake in the 
joints; this is the horse-flesh and the other is 
the beef." It was just a dodge of his to get 
them started on the horse-flesh. Since writing 
about our own experience of horse-flesh we have 
had two more allowances, both times steak, and 
this is as good as any one can want. It does 
not taste quite like beef, but is very good. Even 
Agnes enjoyed it to-day. 

All the week there has been a little shelling at 
intervals through the day, but nothing much. 
News of the column is scarce. In fact, we have 
given up thinking about it. 

The talk all day is of food and of the per- 
mits necessary to get it with. The milk 
business has changed hands now. I think I men- 



96 BESIEGED BY THE BOERS 

tioned that the colonel was talking of comman- 
deering all the fresh milk for infants and in- 
valids, but he decided not to. Instead, he has 
handed over the administration of the milk to a 
civil committee, consisting of Mr. Judge, the 
Mayor (Mr. Oliver), Dr. Stoney, Dr. Macken- 
zie, Dr. Watkins, and myself. How I came 
to be one of this committee I don't know. A 
central depot has been taken for the issue of 
the milk, and we have been trying to get people, 
both dealers and private parties, to send their 
milk to this depot. This has been done by pub- 
lishing an appeal to all those who are strong 
and well to give up using milk, so that infants 
and sick folk may get it. We have given up 
ours now, and many people have done the same. 
The milk is served out at the depot, but only 
to those who have a medical certificate that 
they require it. The military hand over one 
case (forty-eight tins) of condensed milk a day 
to us, and tell us that we need not ask for any 
more, as we shall not get it. This can of milk 
is issued in the same way — on presentation of 
medical certificates only. After the first day's 
work we found that the demand so far exceeded 
the supply that to give everybody a chance we 
should have to make the amount issued to each 
very small, so we cut down the fresh milk to 
half a bottle a da}^ and the condensed milk to one 



HORSE FOR DINNER 97 

tin a week for each person, irrespective of age or 
illness. This worked well as far as the fresh 
milk was concerned, but as one hundred and 
forty-four applied for tins our forty-eight did 
not nearly meet the requirement. Tinned milk 
is more popular than fresh for several reasons. 
Many babies can't take fresh milk at all, and 
a tin is supposed to go farther than seven half 
bottles, and saves sugar besides. Furthermore, 
a tin has only to be fetched once a week, while 
the fresh milk must be applied for every day. 
Of course the amounts are quite insufficient, 
but we hope to get on better and be able to give 
larger amounts of fresh milk in a few days* 
time. The tinned milk problem is hopeless, 
unless we succeed in persuading people who are 
now getting tins to take fresh milk, and for 
the reasons above given I don't think there is 
much hope of that. Of course the dealers who 
send in their milk are paid for it, and the people 
who get orders for it have to pay at a little 
under the price given to the dealers, but as the 
De Beers Company sends a big lot of milk free 
there is a profit on the whole thing, enough for 
working expenses and also to allow a certain 
amount to be given away to poor people who 
need it. 

This is the first time we have been allowed 
to do anything at all by the authorities. One 



98 . BESIEGED BY THE BOERS 

day this week I had to write to the colonel about 
some red tape difficulties which the army doctor 
had put in the way of people getting their food, 
and I suggested to him very circumspectly that 
in matters which affected the health and feed- 
ing of the people we all thought that we doctors 
who knew the town, the climate, and the people 
might be advantageously consulted. He was 
very obliging, and saw at once that my objec- 
tion to the red tape difficulty was sound, so he 
altered the routine, but he flatly declined to ask 
any opinion from the general body of the doc- 
tors, as they might have ideas which would *'af- 
fect the military situation." This is the stock 
answer to everything. 

Later on the colonel met me and did consult 
with me over the scurvy among the natives. 
Usually the natives in the compounds get fruit 
and vegetables enough to prevent their getting 
scurvy, but since we have had to depend on 
ourselves for these the supply has fallen very 
far short of the demand, and of course the na- 
tive supply has gone to a large extent to the 
Europeans. As a consequence, many natives 
have developed scurvy. Nine hundred is the 
number now on hand. Gardener Williams had 
consulted me on the same point earlier in the 
day. The problem was what we could give the 
natives, as there w^as practically no lime juice 
and no vegetables at all, and they must have 



HORSE FOR DINNER 99 

vegetable stuff of some kind or they would all 
die. I worried over the thing all day, trying to 
think of something that grew in sufficient quan- 
tity, and yet was not used by Europeans, and at 
last I think I struck it. This was aloes. There 
are quantities of them all over the town. Now 
I remembered that in Mexico the natives made 
a drink of the juice of aloes by letting it fer- 
ment, so I did not see why the fresh juice should 
not be used as a vegetable drink for these scurvy 
boys. And by-and-by I struck a better idea 
still, and that was to give them the fresh green 
shoots from the vines. There are many use- 
less shoots on a vine which are cut off to pre- 
vent it running too much to wood. When 
young they are soft and succulent like the young 
shoots of a rose tree, but are refreshingly acid 
like sorrel, and I think they should do splen- 
didly. The Company has thousands of vines 
at Kenilworth, and so they have the medicine 
(if it turns out to be so) ready to their hands. 
I told Williams and the colonel these ideas, and 
they started right away on the vine shoots. 
The natives like them immensely, and eat them 
readily. I hope it will be a success, as I shall 
get some kudos if it is, and the natives will get 
better. The aloe juice will perhaps be tried 
later if the supply of the other stuff should 
give out. 

The native question has been and is still a 



100 BESIEGED BY THE BOERS 

very serious one. At the beginning of the 
siege we had a good many thousand natives in 
the compounds, quite fifteen thousand I should 
think. Of course these needed an enormous 
amount of food, and when the siege began to be 
prolonged various efforts were made to get rid 
of them. One big body was sent out early in 
November, and was promptly sent back by the 
Boers, but latterly they have been sent out in 
smaller numbers, and either the Boers are afraid 
to molest them or they manage to dodge the 
pickets. 

Report says that the Boers are taking them 
over and either using them to make their en- 
trenchments or to work the mines in Johannes- 
burg. It is rather a wrong solution of the diffi- 
culty if the natives we send out are used to build 
forts for guns to bombard us, but a native chief 
I know of here says that the Boers dare not 
touch his people as his over-chief (Lerothodi, 
the Basuto head chief) has forty thousand men, 
well armed, at his command, and would attack 
the Free State at once if his subjects were mo- 
lested. 

It may be asked why the British don't turn 
the Basutos upon the Free State. The answer 
to this is that if the Basutos got the better of 
the Dutch they would then attack the Eng- 
lish, for though they like the English much 



HORSE FOR DINNER 101 

better than the Dutch, if they once get to fight- 
ing I do not expect they would discriminate 
one white from another, especially as they have 
never been really beaten. 

I think there is no doubt the Boers have put 
up more forts around us, and we are daily ex- 
pecting more bombarding, this time probably 
on a larger scale. It has been rumoured all the 
last week that the new bombardment was to 
begin next day, but so far it has not done so. 
The longer it is put off the better we shall be 
pleased for many reasons. The De Beers peo- 
ple are making a big gun, and seem to think 
that it will be satisfactory; it will carry about 
a thirty pound shell, and if anything like suc- 
cessful should have a range nearly twice that of 
any gun we have at present. Our gunners 
seem to be much better shots than the Boers, 
so we hope they will be able to amuse them- 
selves and instruct the Boers with the new gun, 
which is expected to be ready in about a week. 

One of our men, in fact he is the contractor 
who built this house, is reported to have made 
a splendid shot one day last week. The cattle 
go out a little way to graze, with a strong body 
of mounted men as a guard, but this guard 
seems to be placed on the Kimberley side of the 
cattle. On the other side of the cattle a num- 
ber of crack rifle shots are scattered behind 



102, BESIEGED BY THE BOERS 

stones or whatever cover they can get, and fire 
at any Boer within range. Tlie Boers have a 
similar lot of "snipers" out. Our man is said 
to have killed a Boer sniper at over two thou- 
sand yards' range. 

By the way, I think I have forgotten to tell 
you of our last military order. This came out 
some time ago, and is that all lights have to 
be put out at 9.30 p.m. This is to make people 
careful of their paraffin and candles. Of course 
some permits are allowed, and equally of course 
I have one, as I often read after going to bed. 
The rule is not rigidly enforced in case of ill- 
ness, but people have to show evidence that 
there is illness in the house if so required. 

January 21st. — The great event of the week 
has been the completion and trial of the new 
gun. Here I was interrupted, and have had 
no further chance to write until now, January 
26th, and in the meantime we have had so much 
to think about that we have not worried about 
the big gun. On the morning of Wednesday, 
the twenty-fourth, the Boers began to shell us 
again quite early in the morning, and we soon 
found that it was quite different to the shelling 
we had had before. The shells came from all 
sides, and as we found out later at least eight 
guns were at work. None of them were bigger 
than they used before, but they were either bet- 



HORSE FOR DINNER 103 

ter guns or better worked and had better am- 
munition, for they reached every part of the 
town except one small area near the De Beers 
Mine. 

January 28th. — Busy again till now. Most 
of the shells are the kind we are used to; just 
like those we had in the first bombardment, but 
a good many were also the shrapnel, which I 
told you about before and which are much more 
dangerous. The bombardment went on all the 
twenty-fourth, all that night, and all the twenty- 
fifth until about 9.30 p.m., and then slackened, 
though a few shells came in on the twenty-sixth, 
but nobody was hurt. I suppose even this has 
been child's play to the bombardment of Mafe- 
king, but it has been quite bad enough. Dur- 
ing the two days about eight hundred shells 
were fired in. The hottest time was, as usual, 
from about 3 a.m. to 8 a.m., and again late in 
the afternoon, especially down in Beaconsfield 
at the latter time. Previously no shells had 
reached us, but they have been all round us this 
time. We did not bother much about them on 
Wednesday morning, though we could hear the 
whiz pretty distinctly and then the report, which 
showed they were not far away. However, 
just as we were sitting down to breakfast one 
whizzed past apparently very near to the house 
end and burst close by, only about one hundred 



104 BESIEGED BY THE BOERS 

and fifty yards away. Our house is almost di- 
rectly between the place it dropped and the 
Dutch gun, so it must have gone very close to 
us. It was a shrapnel, and it is just as well it 
missed us. 

Another dropped about a hundred yards from 
the same end of the house, and wrecked a build- 
ing just at the back of the military office where 
all the work is done, but no one was hurt. 
When I got to the office, at 8.30 a.m., Mac- 
kenzie told me he had been called out to see a 
girl who had been killed by one. She had been 
in one of the shell-proof pits and came out and 
was dressing in her room, thinking that the 
danger was over, but a shell came along and 
burst, and a big piece of it struck her in the 
back, breaking her spine and almost cutting her 
in half. Fortunately it killed her instantly. 
This was the only casualty that day. There 
were heaps of hairbreadth escapes, but no one 
else was touched so far as I know. 

One shell went through Rudd's house. He 
is the son of C. D. Rudd, who has been asso- 
ciated with Rhodes in some of his big schemes. 
He took his family away when war seemed 
likely, and stored a good deal of his furniture 
in one room. This was the room where the 
shell burst, wrecking everything about it. An- 
other went through a patient's house into a bed- 



HORSE FOR DINNER 105 

room and fell under the baby's cot, but did not 
explode. Another exploded under the bed in 
which was an Indian woman who had been con- 
fined only four days. It burst and set the bed- 
ding on fire, but hurt neither the mother nor the 
child, and a second one came into the same 
house later in the day, but without hurting 
any one. 

The De Beers big gun kept pounding away 
in answer to all this, but was only one against 
eight or nine, and being new the men were not 
quite used to its management and it did not 
do much. We heard, a day or two after this, 
that one of the shells had killed three Boers. 

In the afternoon I usually take Agnes out 
with me most of the time, so I told her I had 
to go round into several of the places where the 
shells were coming pretty thick, and suggested 
that she had better stay at home. She, how- 
ever, is very plucky and does not worry about 
the shells a bit, so she said she would come the 
same as usual, for if a shell hit me it might 
as well hit her too. We went along all round 
and did the work, but several shells came within 
a hundred yards of us. Wherever we went 
they seemed to follow us round. In Beacons- 
field the gun with which the Boers are trying 
to hit Rhodes and the Sanatorium dropped one 
fairly near us. We picked a big chunk of it 



106 BESIEGED BY THE BOERS 

up in the main road a few minutes after, still 
hot. This gun gives Beaconsfield and the main 
road leading from Kimberley past the Sana- 
torium to Beaconsfield a very warm time. Sev- 
eral shells have dropped into the main road, one 
just in front of a tram full of people. One 
went through an outhouse on Ruffel's grounds. 
(Mrs. R. and Katie are in Cape Tow^n.) Sev- 
eral fell just outside the hospital, and one 
dropped in the Catholic Orphanage grounds. 

This gun kept firing at intervals all Wednes- 
day night, and some of the others joined it now 
and then. We went to bed as usual, for our 
special gun seemed quiet, and we slept till about 
4 A.M. Then something woke me, and I heard 
two shells go over the house, or very close by, 
and burst somewhere quite near. Our house 
faces the gun that fires these shells, so we con- 
cluded that downstairs was the safest place. I 
took our mattresses down into the hall and put 
them on the floor by the hat-stand, where the 
wall is thickest, and was just going to turn in 
when the Mayor came to fetch me to see his 
wife. I went over to his house, and found 
the shells dropping very close there, but for- 
tunately the patient did not know they were so 
close and so was not nervous. The Mayor sent 
me home in his own cart. 

At my door I found a policeman, who wanted 
me to go and see a family who had been 



HORSE FOR DINNER 107 

smashed up by a shell. I drove straight off 
to the house he told me, and found two poor 
little children badly hurt. They were not in 
their own house, but just across the street, 
where they had been carried. One, six years 
old, had his shoulder shattered and the whole 
side of his head and face torn open; the other, 
a year or two younger, had an arm and a leg 
both broken badly and several wounds in the 
chest. I put them both into the cart and sent 
them straight off to the hospital, and was then 
told that the mother was in her own house also 
badly hurt. I went across and found her lying 
on the floor, with her leg wrapped up in a towel. 
An ambulance man was there, and he told me 
that he had just fastened it up and that it was 
a beastly wound. I sent the mounted police- 
man for the ambulance, and told the man to 
bring her along to the hospital when it arrived. 
Another child was just grazed with a splinter 
of the shell. 

They were all (mother and six children) just 
ready to begin breakfast when the shell burst 
right in the middle of them. The father is a 
volunteer, and is away at one of the camps. 
It is strange that he is said to be a prominent 
member of the Bond, and has all along said the 
Boers were in the right. Whether he thinks so 
now I don't know. 

I went straight off to the hospital and began 



108 BESIEGED BY THE BOERS 

on the worst hurt child. The arm was hope- 
lessly shattered, and I had to take it off at the 
shoulder joint. The head injury was a jagged 
wound from above and behind the ear to the 
corner of the mouth, turning the ear down upon 
the neck, breaking the jaw in two places, and 
ploughing up all the side of the face. There 
was also a big wound on the arm, and a fair- 
sized one on the hip. The wonder and the pity 
was that the poor little chap was not killed out- 
right. I fixed him up as well as I could, ex- 
pecting him to die under my hands all the time, 
but he lived about three hours. Watkins turned 
up while I was busy, and took on the other 
child, and as soon as I was free I attended to 
the mother. She had all the fleshy part of the 
calf ripped up right to the bone, and the wound 
went down to the heel. I was very doubtful 
whether I ought not to take the leg off then and 
there, but there seemed a possible chance of sav- 
ing it, so I fixed it up as well as I could and 
waited developments. She was in rather poor 
condition, having been confined only three 
weeks previous, so the developments soon began. 
Forty-eight hours after the leg was beginning 
to go gangrenous, and I took it off above the 
knee. To-day, seventy-two hours after, she is 
better than she has been yet, but is not by any 
means out of danger. 



HORSE FOR DINNER 109 

And this is what the Boers call fair play! 
Of the previous bombardment their comman- 
dant wrote to his chiefs that he directed his guns 
to the middle of the town to do as much dam- 
age as possible, and this is their aim again now. 
They must know that nearly all the men are in 
the forts, and that very few people except 
women and children are left in the town, and 
yet they fire not at the forts but into the town. 
I have no doubt they will say they fired at the 
forts and their shells went too far, but we shall 
not believe that. 

All that day the shelling went on until about 
9.30 P.M., and since then we have had practi- 
cally none. Twice that afternoon I very nar- 
rowly escaped a shell. At one house I called 
I was talking on the veranda for some time, 
and within twenty minutes of that a shell fell 
into the garden between the veranda and the 
road not ten feet from where I had been. Again 
I had just gone across the Market Square at 
Beaconsfield and got to the corner when a shell 
fell just where I had crossed not one minute 
before. No one can imagine the relief it was 
when the shelling ceased. It is not altogether 
a question of fear, but the knowledge that wher- 
ever you are a shell may drop on you at any 
moment, and that you have to do your work 
all the same, does not much exhilarate you. I 



no BESIEGED BY THE BOERS 

suppose if a doctor gets killed on duty his pa- 
tients will promptly say how incautious he was 
to come out, but if he stays at home they say 
he is a coward. 

To-day, Sunday, I don't think a shot has been 
fired on either side, but there are many rumours 
as to what is in store for us to-morrow. More 
guns, bigger guns, and closer to us is what most 
of the rumours amount to, but no one knows 
whether there is any truth in it all. Nearly the 
whole town has been busy building shell-proof 
shelters, but we have decided not to do so. Our 
house is pretty solid, and unless they bring very 
big guns to bear upon us we are only liable to 
be reached by the shells that come from the 
long side of the house, in the direction in which 
most of the windows face. If we keep in the 
bottom story and in the hall I do not think we 
can be damaged. All the shells that have burst 
have done so in the first room they entered, and 
only the pieces go through into the second room 
if the wall is very flhusy. Our walls are solid, 
so I think we should be pretty safe in the hall 
either where the bookcase is or at the other end 
by the hat-stand. 

The shell-proof places are ghastly little dog 
holes, like the Black Hole of Calcutta, in most 
cases. Some of the rich people have put up good 
ones, double layers of sandbags built up on their 



HORSE FOR DINNER 111 

verandas to a decent height and roofed either 
with sheet-steel or old railway iron or thick 
deals with plenty of sandbags on the top of 
them, and in these there has been some attempt 
at ventilation. But the poorer people have dug 
holes in their yards or gardens and roofed them 
with anything that came handy, and then either 
sandbags or the loose earth out of the hole was 
put on top. In these you can't stand up, and 
there is no ventilation at all, so they are about 
as deadly as the Boer shells, but plenty of peo- 
ple seem to find comfort in being in them. One 
woman I know fled into hers early on Wednes- 
day morning and never came out till late Fri- 
day afternoon, but she is the one who had a 
shell through her house in the first bombard- 
ment, so she was likely to be timid. 



CHAPTER VIII 

OUR BIG GUN AND THE BOERS' BIGGER ONE 

Now, having finished about the bombardment 
while it was fresh in my mind, I must go back 
and mention the De Beers gun. We had heard 
rumours that a big gun was being made for 
some time before the second bombardment, and 
we soon heard from the men at the De Beers 
machine shops that it was true. I did not go 
down to see it until it was nearly done, but I 
looked in a few days before it was completed, 
and took Agnes down next day, as she was in- 
terested in it. The gun has since been chris- 
tened ''Long Cecil," but many of us prefer 
other names for it. My favourite is "The De 
Beers Baby," but another good one is "St. 
Cecilia." 

It is a splendid piece of work, especially when 
you consider that many of the tools necessary 
to do the rifling and other complicated work 
had to be made in the shops, and that the men 



OUR BIG GUN 113 

were not used to the work, and that even the 
material used was only, so to speak, makeshift. 
The gun is about ten feet long, and is built upon 
the Woolwich Infant principle, slender near the 
muzzle, thicker in the middle, and very much 
thicker at the breech. The narrow part is about 
nine or ten inches through, and the thickest 
part at the breech about twenty or so. The 
shell it carries is 4.1 inches in diameter, and 
weighs twenty-eight and a half pounds. Of 
course a proper gun carriage and everything 
complete was made at the same time, and at last 
all was in order. There was great speculation 
as to what would happen the first time the gun 
was fired, but the people principally concerned 
were confident that he would be all right, and 
so he was. 

They took him out of the shop on the morn- 
ing of January 19th, and pointed him at the 
midway pumping station half way from here to 
Riverton, about sixty-five hundred yards from 
where he was fired, and let him go. To every- 
body's delight, he reached it quite easily. The 
Boers have had a big camp there all the time, as 
it was out of reach of our other guns, and there 
were good buildings and plenty of water there. 
After a few shells had been dropped pretty 
close the Boers were seen to be buzzing about 
and departing, like a hive of bees when a brick 



114 BESIEGED BY THE BOERS 

is thrown into it. A few days afterwards our 
men caught a Dutch despatch rider, and in his 
pouch was a letter from a Boer to his home 
people, describing their consternation when the 
shells began to drop about them as they were 
at breakfast. 

The gun did very good shooting that day. 
They took it back to the shop to make the pow- 
der chamber larger, so that it vv^ould hold seven 
pounds of powder, instead of five and a half, 
and so increase the range, but somehow this di," 
not seem to improve the shooting, and though 
it has done good work during the bombardment 
the men seem to think it is not so accurate as 
before. On the same day that the gun was 
tried I see in my diary that we had a new vege- 
table issued to us — the common or household 
mangold wurzel. Horse-flesh and wurzel does 
not sound luxurious, but they would be all right 
if there were only plenty of them. The wur- 
zels are the globe yellow sort and are very good, 
not to be distinguished from the beet except by 
the colour. 

February 2d. — Thank goodness the expected 
heavy bombardment has not come off. Every 
day a few shells have dropped in, but only a 
very few, most days only three or four, so we 
have had quite a holiday. "Long Cecil" fired 
one shot early on Monday and no more, and 



OUR BIG GUN 115 

later on we learned that he deranged his mech- 
anism with that shot, and had to go back to the 
shop again. He was to have been all right 
again to-day, but has not been fired, so perhaps 
he is still out of gear. All this time I have been 
wanting to send money to the Cape. I kept 
waiting and waiting, hoping that we should get 
relieved, but early in January I thought I would 
wait no more. I went to the bank and got a 
draft in duplicate just in the usual way, and 
then I prevailed upon the military people to let 
me send the duplicate drafts off by their de- 
spatch riders, with a short letter, on two differ- 
ent nights, hoping that at least one of them 
would manage to get through. About a week 
after this the banks made an arrangement by 
which the military would flash money to the 
relief column, and so on to Cape Town, by the 
search-light. So then I wished I had waited a 
little longer. About a month afterwards the 
authorities told me that neither of the despatch 
riders had got through and neither of them 
had returned, so they were either dead or pris- 
oners. This was cheerful, for my drafts were 
probably in the hands of the Boers. 

February 4th. — To-day we have had a new 
sort of food — donkey, instead of horse-flesh. 
The butcher who serves me always delights in 
trying to harrow up my feelings by telling me 



116 BESIEGED BY THE BOERS 

what the meat is, but I guess he will soon give 
up, for I always say, **'A11 right, as long as it 
is meat it is all the same to me." A few days 
ago my driver told me that a Chinaman had 
been offering Mackenzie's driver a good price 
for cats, which he wanted to eat — 5^. 6d. for 
small ones and 12s. 6d. for large ones. We 
have not come to that yet, but the Chinese are 
fond of cats at all times. The bread ration in 
town has been cut down within the last few 
days; previously it was fourteen ounces per 
head, now it is only ten and a half, so stores 
have to be husbanded very carefully. For the 
last few weeks we doctors, or rather the careful 
and conscientious ones of us, have been having 
great difficulties with food permits. The regu- 
lar rations issued consist of bread, horse-flesh 
or beef, mealie meal, and crushed mealies, with 
vegetables about once in ten days, and tea or 
coffee and sugar. For the last few weeks 
nothing more of any description is allowed to 
be sold without a doctor's written order. 

The doctors all have orders not to give per- 
mits except in cases where the people are sick, 
and then only in very moderate quantities. As I 
have said before every patient demands a permit 
for something, many of them being manifestly 
in robust health. The usual story was 'T won't 
eat horse-flesh, and so I must have something 
else/' My answer to these people has invari- 



OUR BIG GUN 117 

ably been: ''Our orders are that we are not in 
any way to help people who refuse to eat horse- 
flesh, therefore you can wait till you are hungry 
enough to eat it or you can starve. You will 
get no permit from me." 

The fat Jews, who have always lived on the 
best of everything naturally do ' not like this, 
and so they go off to some other man whom 
they can bully, blarney, or bribe and get what- 
ever they choose to ask for, cursing me fluently 
all the time. They say their religion forbids 
them to eat horse. 

Several of the doctors are notorious for giv- 
ing permits to anybody. We can only suppose 
that they make the people pay for it. I am 
afraid I am notorious in the other way, and 
consequently am not particularly beloved. 
However, I have done the right thing, and none 
of my sick people have had any reasonable re- 
quest refused. 

None of this trouble would have arisen if 
the army doctor, who is really responsible for 
the proper issue of the medical comforts, had 
been a man of determination, but he has no 
backbone and is too fond of red tape. He pro- 
fesses to be too busy to look into these things 
carefully. If he had gone into things, even 
superficially, he would have discovered the of- 
fenders easily. 

At last about a week ago the Food Supply 



118 BESIEGED BY THE BOERS 

Committee told the colonel that the permit sys- 
tem was being scandalously abused, as the com- 
forts meant for the sick were being frittered 
away on perfectly healthy and strong people. 
The colonel appointed a committee to enquire 
into it, and both Mackenzie and I were members 
of it. I had on several occasions worried the 
colonel myself, so he knew I was interested in it. 
We devised a stringent system of issuing per- 
mits, which I hope will work much better, but 
the supervisor is hopeless. He seems absolutely 
to have no intelligence whatever. For instance, 
one rule is that no patient shall draw more than 
one comfort except in cases of urgent need, and 
then must have a written explanation of their 
case on the back of their permit. The sensible 
way seems to me to be this : Let the doctor issue 
one of the articles ordered at once, and then 
visit the patient and satisfy himself that the 
others are really required before issuing them. 
As it is now all the articles are issued at once, 
and then enquiries are made to see if they were 
really needed. I got a penal clause put into 
the rules providing that any doctor not acting 
up to them should, at the discretion of the col- 
onel, forfeit his right to sign permits, but I'm 
afraid it won't be acted upon. These rules 
were just a month too late, in fact on the first 
day they were in force the last tin of butter in 



OUR BIG GUN 119 

the town was issued, whereas if it had been 
taken proper care of and only issued to the 
sick there would have been enough to last 
through the siege. 

After February 4th things proceeded quietly 
until the seventh. On that morning I was 
called to a confinement case in one of the outly- 
ing parts of the town rather near one part of the 
Boer lines. While there, in addition to the 
usual intermittent shelling with the artillery 
of both sides, I heard a much bigger gun 
begin. There was a big boom, then a tremen- 
dous whiz somewhere over or near the house I 
was in, and then by-and-by a good big boom 
when the shell burst. I was pleased at this, as 
I thought this was ''Long Cecil" opening on 
the Boers at Carter's Farm. When I came out 
after it was all over my driver, Daniel, looked 
pretty sick, and said, "The Boers have got a 
big gun at Kamfersdam and are firing into 
the town with it." And so it was. He said 
the shells were falling near the Market Square, 
which I wanted to cross. This looked cheer- 
ful, but I had to go up town, so we drove off. 
When we nearly got to the square we heard a 
shell strike close to us, but we did not stay to 
enquire. Later on I found out that this shell 
had dropped into a house on the left side of the 
street and, exploding, killed a horse in a shoe- 



120 BESIEGED BY THE BOERS 

ing forge on the right side of the street, less 
than a hundred yards behind me. If I had 
been coming up about one minute later that 
piece might easily have got me. A piece of 
the same shell flew diagonally through an open 
window in the De Beers office, at which a friend 
of mine was sitting, passed him without touch- 
ing him, struck an iron safe, bounced off that 
to the wall, and from there into the fireplace, 
where it stopped. The piece weighed eleven 
pounds, and my friend departed without wait- 
ing to put on his hat. The gun kept on firing 
until mid-day, when it stopped to cool and to 
let the Boers have dinner, but it started again 
about three in the afternoon, and went at it hot 
and strong. About four I was at Ruffels call- 
ing for messages and heard a big shell come 
over and burst not very far away, and then I 
came down to the house for tea. When I got 
near I saw a lot of people rushing up the lane 
along the long side of the house, and I found 
that this shell had landed in our next door 
neighbour's stable. There was a very sulphury 
smell in the air and a big cloud of dust, but 
our house seemed to be all right. I rushed 
indoors and called for Agnes, and she answered 
that she was all right, neither of the servants 
hurt, and the house untouched. 

Agnes was upstairs putting on her hat to 



OUR BIG GUN 121 

come out with me when she heard the shell 
whiz and explode, and saw the whole stable 
roof lift up. Fortunately the shell fell in soft 
ground and went in some way before bursting, 
so the pieces did not fly, and beyond wrecking 
the building no damage was done. Our house 
was filled with dust, and smoke and splinters of 
wood, and roofing flew over into our garden. 
A few fair-sized stones came over, too, one 
weighing about six pounds, and two whole 
sheets of galvanised iron; one of these fell on 
our beet-root bed and the other cut the cord of 
the veranda blind and notched the veranda rail. 
Our domestic took shelter under her bed, but 
was unearthed unhurt without difiiculty. Agnes 
was ready to go out with me, so I took her out, 
as she did not feel safe in the house. Up to 
this time she had stood the shelling splendidly, 
but this was coming a bit too close to be pleas- 
ant, and rather took "the curl" out of us both. 
While we were on our rounds we went into 
Ruff el's branch shop near the station, and a 
piece of shell was shown to us which had just 
dropped through the roof there. It was a solid 
piece, of about eight pounds' weight and an inch 
and a half thick, and made us appreciate the 
value of bomb-proof shelters. Later on (they 
were shelling all the time) we had to go into the 
De Beers workshops, and there we found one 



122 BESIEGED BY THE BOERS 

of the big shells which had not exploded. It 
had fallen out on the veldt at the back of the 
hospital. 

The people who picked it up took it to 
Rhodes, and he gave them £5 for it. He sent 
it down to the shops to have the powder taken 
out of it and to get polished up. Down there 
they handled it very gingerly, for only a few 
weeks before we had had news from Mafeking 
of a blacksmith's trying to open a similar shell, 
when it exploded, blew off his legs and one of 
another man's, and killed a third man. So 
they had good reason to be careful, and let it 
soak in a tub of water for a few hours. 

My driver had seen one of the men who picked 
this shell up, and told me he said it was as big 
as the hand-bag that I carry instruments about 
in. Seeing that this came from a coloured 
man, of course I did not believe it, but it proved 
to be rather under than over the truth, for this 
infernal affair was eighteen inches and a half 
long, six inches in diameter at the base, and 
weighed eighty-seven pounds. We found later 
that these shells were not very accurately made^ 
many of them being twenty inches long and 
weighing considerably more than the regulation 
one hundred pounds. As you can imagine, the 
sight of this did not encourage us, for we knew 
that a gun big enough to carry this shell could 




BOER lOO-POUND SHELL AND DE BEERS Q-POUNDER, 



OUR BIG GUN 123 

reach any part of Kimberley or Beaconsfield, 
so there was no possibihty of getting out of its 
range ; and we also saw that there was no build- 
ing in Kimberley, except perhaps the strong 
rooms at the banks, that would not be pene- 
trated easily by it. 

Fortunately, the gun was fired from a place 
almost directly opposite the front-door end of 
our house, so if we kept either in the little pas- 
sage at the back of the dining-room or, better 
still, in the covered way between the house and 
the kitchen-block we should be fairly safe; for 
we had come to know from experience that a 
shell is usually exploded by the first wall it 
touches, but that it has sufficient impetus to 
carry it through that wall, and actually bursts 
in the first room it comes into. Coming from 
the direction they did, these shells would have 
to come through at least two pretty solid walls 
before they reached the other end of the house, 
and this made us feel fairly safe. The shell- 
ing went on until about dark and then stopped, 
greatly to our relief. The damage done was 
not great; two men were a little hurt by splin- 
ters of wood, and a child was more seriously 
hurt, and subsequently died, not exactly from 
the shell wound but undoubtedly partly through 
its effect. 

Next morning we expected to be roused quite 



124 BESIEGED BY THE BOERS 

early by the big gun, but to our great delight it 
did not start, and as the day crept on all sorts 
of rumours began to fly about, the favourite one 
being that ''Long Cecil," who had been pound- 
ing away manfully at this Boer gun all the 
previous day, had smashed it. 

When lunch-time came and no big gun, we 
began to feel quite cheerful; but about four 
o'clock the enemy began again, and for some 
time heaved a shell into us every two minutes. 
They could not keep that up long, however, as 
of course the gun got hot and had to cool off. 
One of the early shells burst in the air and a 
piece of it dropped through a roof near the 
bank and knocked a man's brains out, killing 
him on the spot. Another came into a photog- 
rapher's establishment opposite the Club, burst 
on the pavement, and fragments of it flew on to 
the Club veranda and out at the side, one of 
them rising high again and knocking the cross 
off the end of the Catholic church at the side 
of the Club. A patient of mine got a chunk 
of this in his leg as he stood at the Club. Just 
where the shell came through the photographer's 
wall a big portrait of Rhodes hung, and the 
shell landed squarely in the middle of this, 
knocking it into smithereens. A little later on 
another shell dropped into a big shop next door 
to S 's, and set fire to it. The whole place 



OUR BIG GUN 125 

burned down, and S 's house caught fire also, 

but they managed to put this out. 

When this happened I had only just left 

S 's private house, where I had been seeing 

Mrs. S , who was ill. S and I had 

been joking (we had to joke to keep up our 
spirits) about the shells, and he had asked me 
to give him some medicine to make his knees 
feel stronger when the gun went off; the very 
next minute his shop was nearly destro3^ed. 



CHAPTER IX 

THE RUSH FOR SHELTER 

Agnes still declared she did not want a shelter 
made on our premises; but I could see she was 
a good deal shaken by these unpleasant visitors, 
so I went to Gardener Williams and asked 
him to let me have timber and iron from the 
De Beers stores, with a white overseer and some 
natives to build a fort. He was very good, 
and consented at once. I felt sure Agnes would 
be happier with a shelter, and we neither of 
us felt very safe sleeping upstairs, when the 
gun was liable to fire at any moment, and the 
first shell might be the very one to drop on us; 
if we got a fort we could sleep all night in it, 
and not have to turn out as soon as the gun 
began. 

On this second day of the big gun's regime 
a system of signalling was established, which 
was a great help to us. The gun was firing 
ordinary powder and not cordite, so it made a 



THE RUSH FOR SHELTER 127 

big puff of smoke each time. This could easily 
be seen from the conning tower and other prom- 
inent positions in the forts. The moment the 
lookout on the conning tower saw the puff, he 
would wave a red flag, and a bugler standing 
by him would blow the alarm. The gun was 
about three and a half miles from us, so there 
was an appreciable interval between the puff of 
smoke and the arrival of the shell. If the 
bugler got his little tune off promptly there was 
about fifteen seconds' warning, and this gave 
one plenty of time to dodge under a wall or 
put up an umbrella (one man was actually seen 
to do this!), or rush into a fort. Often, how- 
ever, the interval was much less. At the Sana- 
torium there was a lookout station on the roof, 
from which the puff of smoke could be seen, and 
the watcher there banged on the dinner gong 
for all he was worth each time the ominous 
signal appeared. We decided Rhodes was hav- 
ing plenty of meals when we heard the gong 
going so often, and were much amused when 
we found out that it was a shell signal. 

At another place the lookout used to hammer 
one iron bar against another which was hung 
up by the end. This is a cheap sort of bell 
which is common in this country, and can be 
heard a long way. From many places anxious 
watchers could see the red flag waved, though 



128 BESIEGED BY THE BOERS 

they did not hear the alarms, and in front of the 
town-hall a policeman was stationed in an auc- 
tioneer's pulpit to blow his whistle when he 
saw the signal. On the whole, we had music 
in great quantity and variety during these days. 
Next day, February 9th, was about the worst 
of all, for they pumped shells into us almost 
all day, only stopping for refreshments or to 
cool the gun. They began about 6 a.m. and 
went on till dark. About nine a shell went into 
a house near the station, killing a baby in its 
mother's arms and badly injuring the poor 
woman. At first she did well, but she took a 
wrong turn about thirty hours later, and died 
on the third day. Another shell went through 
a store close behind me while I was seeing pa- 
tients at the office, and scattered pieces on the 
roof above my head, but I sat tight and went 
on with the prescription I was writing. All the 
same I was badly scared, for it is not nice to 
know that the last shells have fallen somewhere 
near you, and then to hear the bugle go again, 
yet to continue quietly what you are doing, with 
your ears pricked up for the boom of the gun 
and the zvhij^, wondering all the time whether 
this is the one that is going to get you or not. 
When you hear the shell bump into some other 
building and burst with a crash you are happy 
at once, for you know you are safe for this time 



THE RUSH FOR SHELTER 129 

at least. The innate selfishness of human nature 
shows up too strongly under such circumstances 
to grieve over the other fellow. 

We soon found that if the shells burst in a 
building the pieces were stopped and could not 
fly; but if they burst in the air or struck hard 
rock or road they would fly in a fearful man- 
ner, some of them going hundreds of yards, 
buzzing like a steam-saw all the time. These 
pieces were far more dangerous than the shell 
itself, and we did not like them a bit. A fair 
proportion of the shells did not explode, either 
because they were bad or because, being fired 
at a very short range for so large a gun, they 
struck on their sides and not on their points. 
Some of them ricochetted off hard ground and 
went half a mile before dropping again. The 
fragments sometimes weighed as much as twen- 
ty pounds, but more usually were from two to 
ten. The latter, however, were quite big 
enough for our taste. 

By-and-by we found that there was a certain 
sort of method in the firing. They would point 
the gun at some particular object, the town-hall 
and the conning tower being the favourite ones, 
and fire eight or ten shots till the gun was hot. 
Then they would point it somewhere else for 
eight or ten shots, and so on. As a matter of 
fact, their marksmanship was disgraceful; I 



130 BESIEGED BY THE BOERS 

don't think they once hit anything they aimed 
at, but they did a fair amount of damage all 
the same. Sometimes they departed from this 
rule and fired anyhow, no two shots in the 
same direction, and then things were not pleas- 
ant. Taking it all around, it was not pleasant 
work going to see patients when the fi.ring 
was on; but if the enemy were firing in one 
quarter one had to leave those patients until 
they had slewed the gun round a bit to an- 
other part, thus dodging the exposed sections 
as much as possible. 

I think the doctors' drivers had the worst 
job of all, for they had to sit in the carts and 
wait, whilst we were in the houses. As a mat- 
ter of fact, the houses were little if any safer 
than the open, but somehow you felt safer in- 
side than out. Several drivers chucked up their 
jobs and ran away, but mine stuck to his work 
like a brick and never flinched or hesitated 
wherever he had to go, though he admitted he 
was often badly scared. That was precisely 
my ovv^n feeling. I was badly scared most of 
the time, but the work had to be done, and I 
felt that if a shell was destined to hit me it 
would do so, whether I was in or out, in a shel- 
ter or not; so, though I did not try to get in 
the way, I went about my work as usual, and 
never missed a single office hour or visiting a 







1 : 














* m 


"„, . - , ^^rm- 


s 




vs3;.>«sai| ' j»gKJffliii|..^ 


i 




^mimk\ .. p^^B 






^Ljsm 


1 V: 




i fc^ 




'•^ 




i.>'&f^^« 



THE RUSH FOR SHELTER 131 

single patient on account of the shells. And I 
think all the doctors did the same. You ma}^ 
be sure my driver lost nothing by sticking to 
his post. When we were relieved I gave him 
£io and our Zulu boy £5, for the latter had 
come and done his work just the same as usual 
in spite of the shells. 

It was on February 9th that the De Beers 
people began to put up my splinter-proof shel- 
ter. It was placed in the passageway between 
the dining-room and the store-room, and the 
entrance to it was just outside the back door of 
the house proper. The passage was nearly 
seven feet wide, so there was plenty of room. 
First of all strong steel plates (five eighths of 
an inch thick) were put up against the wall 
of the dining-room; then a framework of huge 
mine-props twelve inches thick was erected ; the 
roof was made of similar timbers, seven feet 
high; and on top of these timbers another steel 
plate was laid. The shells could not come 
from the kitchen side at all, so we left that wall 
just as it was. Finally the two sides were built 
up with sacks filled with earth taken out of the 
garden and laid endways, so that a shell or 
splinter would have to come through quite two 
feet of earth before getting at us. We were 
late beginning our fort, and nearly all the sacks 
in town were gone, but I went round to several 



132 BESIEGED BY THE BOERS 

of the bakers and managed to ferret out a good 
pile of them. It took a lot of earth to fill the 
sacks, and this had to be dug out of the gar- 
den. I had a nice patch of barley growing for 
my horses, but this all went into the sacks, to- 
gether with lots of bulbs and other garden stuff. 
I knew the bulbs would not be hurt, but the 
rest of the truck would be beyond resurrection. 
Still, unfortunate as this was, it seemed of little 
importance when we heard a big shell smash 
through the wall. 

On the first day the fort did not make much 
progress, as the boys were sawing the timbers 
the right length and getting the material to- 
gether. I think they liked working for us; we 
gave them lim.e juice to drink, as it was so 
hot, and they said they were very hungry, so 
we got them some big chunks of very coarse 
brown bread, which they seemed to appreciate. 
Everybody was on short comm.ons at this time, 
and I fancy the compound boys were getting 
little except mealie porridge, and none too much 
of that. 

By the way, I ought to have noted that about 
this time I sold one of my horses to be killed 
and eaten. He was one of the original horses 
I bought when I took over the practice, and had 
done heaps of good work for me. Before the 
war, as he was getting old, I turned him out 



THE RUSH FOR SHELTER 133 

to grass on a farm, meaning to let him end his 
days in peace there, and only getting him in for 
a few weeks now and then to relieve a sick 
or lame horse. When the war broke out, how- 
ever, I had to take him back or let the Dutch 
steal him, so for a time I kept three horses, but 
forage got so scarce that I had to get along with 
two. I would never have sold him to be 
worked and hammered about in a Scotch cart, 
but now it was a case of either turning him out 
to die of starvation on the veldt or selling him 
to be eaten. So I sent the poor old chap to 
the butcher, and he went to feed the Lan- 
cashires. He fetched £13. 

The shelling on this day, February 9th, went 
on till dark. One shell went through Watkins' 
back fence into a shed where carriages were 
stored, and smashed a Victoria into little bits, 
but did not explode — fortunately for Watkins. 
Another (and this is about the most wonder- 
ful escape of the siege) fell into a room where 
a lady was in bed, just missed her hip, broke the 
side of the bedstead into bits, and harmlessly 
buried itself in the foundation under the floor. 
Had it exploded she would have been blown 
into little bits. 

The last shell that night was the biggest trag- 
edy of the siege. It went into the Grand Hotel, 
at the corner of the Market Square, and killed 



134 BESIEGED BY THE BOERS 

George Labram, the chief engineer of the De 
Beers Company. He, of all the people in Kim- 
berley, had probably done more to frustrate the 
plans of the Boers and make things unpleasant 
for them than anybody else. He fixed up the 
new water supply when our proper supply was 
cut off, he made the shells for our guns to use, 
and it was he who manufactured "Long Cecil," 
actually having to make for himself many of 
the necessary tools for the rifling. In many 
other minor ways he had helped the military 
to worry the Boers. 

He was an American, and just as smart as 
they make them even in America, and was a 
first-rate fellow into the bargain. He had had 
several narrow shaves with the shells, but this 
day it seemed as if he were somehow singled 
out. Coming away from the machine shops at 
half past five, a shell very nearly got him, and 
then he came to the hotel for dinner. His room 
was on the top floor, and the hotel was directly 
in the big gun's line of fire when it was aimed 
at the town-hall, so it was really not a safe 
place at all. 

Labram stayed downstairs in the hotel till 
the firing seemed to have ceased and then he 
went up to wash before dinner. In these few 
moments a final shell came along and killed 
him. He was shockingly crushed; the only 




OUR SHELTER — EAST SIDE. 




OUR SHELTER — WEST SIDE. 



THE RUSH FOR SHELTER 135 

consolation was that death must have been in- 
stantaneous, and he could have felt no pain. 
To add to the strangeness of it all, one of the 
hotel servants was in the room at the same 
time and he was not touched. 

The poor chap's wife was away in America, 
so the De Beers Comipany arranged to have the 
body embalmed as well as they could and have 
it soldered up in an air-tight coffin, in order 
that he might be taken home and buried later 
en. This accident, as you may well im^agine, 
cast a heavy gloom over us, for everybody knew 
and liked the man, and none of us could help 
realising that his own turn might come next. 

All this day, besides the work on private 
shelters, big public shelters v/ere being miade 
wherever there were convenient places. These 
were made by the Be Beers Company's boys 
and the natives who were working on the roads 
for the Relief Committee. Most of the shelters 
vrere made in the sides of the debris heaps which 
were almost all over the town; a deep trench 
was cut in the sloping sides of the heaps, and 
this was lined and roofed with timber and gal- 
vanised iron, a thick layer of earth being thrown 
en the top and banked up against the front face 
of the shelter. Several of these shelters were 
many yards long and had several openings, so 
that people could get in and out easily. 



136 BESIEGED BY THE BOERS 

In Beaconsfield on one side of the main road 
there was a large heap with an almost per- 
pendicular face, and here they drove tunnels 
straight into the heap ; it looked very queer from 
the road to see these catacombs and their in- 
habitants. The big bridge which carried the 
road over the railway near the station was made 
into a shelter by leaning timbers against the 
sides of it, putting steel plates next them, and 
then banking up with sandbags and loose earth. 
Many people who lived near the station took 
refuge under trenches in the station building, 
in the engine sheds, in the ashpits, and under 
the engines, of which we had a dozen or more 
in Kimberley. 

Speaking of the railway reminds me that a 
shell struck one of the rails near the station 
and knocked out a piece of rail twenty-two 
inches long, depositing it upon the roof of a 
hotel over one hundred yards away. 

All through the bombardment the people who 
lived near any of the culverts which carry the 
rain-water off used to shelter there when shell- 
ing was going on, and many of those who lived 
near debris heaps made their own private ex- 
cavations. A wide drain quite ten feet deep 
runs around the public gardens, and many of 
the better-class inhabitants made shelters in this 
by getting old railway or tram rails and roofing 



THE RUSH FOR SHELTER 137 

a part of the drain with them, piling loose earth 
on top. 

On the next day, Saturday, February ioth,we 
were all quite depressed on account of Labram's 
death, and because we expected heavy shelling 
again ; but, to our relief, it did not come off, and 
we had comparatively few of these unwelcome 
visitors that day. A few came in between six 
and nine in the morning, and then no more till 
about 4.30 P.M., but we had a few of the smaller 
shells from guns in other parts. These, how- 
ever, we quite disregarded; after the big gun 
we hardly minded the smaller ones at all; they 
seemed just as if the Boers were spitting at us. 

Of course there were all sorts of reasons 
given why the big gun rested so long — it had 
burst, they were short of ammunition, etc. The 
real reason was that some of our men had got 
into a position about seventeen hundred yards 
from it and made things too lively for the men 
working it whenever they brought it out to fire. 

We had at first thought that it was what is 
called a disappearing gun, which is worked 
from a deep pit, only being raised to be fired; 
but, as we soon found out, it was nothing of 
the sort; its carriage moved sideways, so it was 
hauled behind a strong fortification to be loaded 
and then pushed out to be sighted and fired, so 
since the moment it appeared from behind its 



138 BESIEGED BY THE BOERS 

shelter our riflemen and "Big Cecil" let fly at 
it and the men working it; they made the posi- 
tion so warm that the Boers did very little all 
day. Later on we heard that the two principal 
men on the gun were Frenchmen, and that one 
of our bullets curled one of them up, going 
clean through his head. This dodge of ours 
was kept up until we were relieved, and five or 
six of the men at the gun are said to have been 
killed altogether. Anyhow, it damped their ar- 
dour a good deal, and prevented their firing as 
much as they otherwise would have done. 

I was fairly busy all the day, as I had an op- 
eration for a bad case and a lot of other work 
besides. In several places I found my patients 
who were too ill to be up lying on mattresses 
in their shelters — and ghastly little dog kennels 
lots of them were. The entrances were of 
course very low and narrow, to prevent splin- 
ters of shell flying in, and I had to back down 
into them just as I used to into the North 
Sea fishing-smack cabins. The atmosphere of 
them reminded me of the smacks, too, for they 
were fearfully hot, and in most of them there 
was not the least attempt at ventilation, though 
a few had pieces of iron piping stuck through 
the roof. During the day our own shelter ad- 
vanced rapidly; the roof was all completed, the 
most exposed side built up to within about two 



THE RUSH FOR SHELTER 139 

feet of the roof, and the other side nearly fin- 
ished also. 

About 4.30 the gun started again, and went 
along till nearly half past six, but very little 
damage was done. One small piece came 
through the Club veranda roof, and another 
slightly wounded one of the Lancashires. 
When the gun stopped we congratulated our- 
selves that we had got off easily, but we soon 
found we were a bit too previous. Labram's 
funeral had been arranged for 8 p.m., for it was 
sure to be a very large one, and the Boers would 
be able to see it and fire at the people following 
by daylight, so it was decided to have it after 
dark. The procession had hardly left the hos- 
pital gates (it is said by people who were look- 
ing out) when a rocket was sent up somewhere 
not far from the hospital, and the big gun 
started immediately, and put four or five shells 
very close indeed to the funeral. Some infernal 
traitor had no doubt told the Boers all about 
the funeral arrangements and sent up the 
rocket to let them know when it started. This 
sort of thing we had become quite used to, for 
our half-hearted special court (called "martial" 
because there were no soldiers in it) never con- 
victed any traitor unless absolutely compelled to. 

When the funeral was over we expected the 
shells to stop. I had to see a patient at the 



140 BESIEGED BY THE BOERS 

hospital, and two more in the main road be- 
tween my house and there. At nine o'clock 
I started out, and when about a hundred yards 
or so away I saw a big flash of light. As it 
was a dark, cloudy night I thought this was 
lightning. Then I heard the bugle, but did not 
take much notice of it, for the bugle in the camp 
close by always sounded at nine. A minute 
later I heard the boom of the gun, and pres- 
ently the shell came along, so near that I cow- 
ered down under a galvanised iron fence. Not 
that that would be any protection, but anyhow 
it felt safer. Some pieces of shell or stones 
thrown up by the shell rattled on the roofs round 
me. I picked myself up and moved on a little 
to the first patient I wanted to see. A few 
shells passed by while I was in the house, and 
when I came out the patient's husband walked 
down his garden with me to the gate; half way 
down the garden £:ip! came a shell very close. 
We both dropped flat, pulled in our heads, and 
lay like a pair of tortoises, while the pieces 
dropped all round us ; luckily, however, we were 
not touched. 

We got up presently and went over ourselves 
just to see that no arms or legs or heads had 
dropped off, and then I moved on to the next 
patient, the one on whom I had operated that 
afternoon. She was well under morphia, but 



THE RUSH FOR SHELTER 141 

the shells were dropping all round her house, 
and had frightened her a good deal. While I 
was seeing her one burst close by, and the pieces 
rattled on the roof of the room she was in. 
When I left her I stayed on the front veranda 
for a couple of minutes talking to her husband, 
and in a moment bang came a shell into a house 
exactly opposite where I was, but on the other 
side of the road. Then I went on to the hospital. 
Shelling is bad enough in the daytime, but it 
is something indescribable at night. In the 
day you can see where the thing lands, and if it 
is not too close you know you are all right and 
relax; but at night first you hear the bugle, 
and you try to sit tight and pretend you don't 
notice it; then comes the boom and whi^, and 
you have to pretend harder than ever. Even 
when the shell bursts and you know that that 
one at any rate has not got you, you don't feel 
happy during the next minute or two, for the 
splinters fly so that there is plenty of time for 
)^ou to congratulate yourself on escaping the 
shell and then get your head caved in by one of 
these after-thoughts. 

After I got to the hospital the shells did not 
seem to be quite so close. I sat on the veranda 
with the doctors, yarned to them, and listened 
to the music for quite an hour and a half. I 
wanted to get home, as I knew Agnes would im- 



142 BESIEGED BY THE BOERS 

pgine that I had run against a shell, but good as 
home seemed to be, where I was was plenty good 
enough while the shells were falling so thick. 
One landed fairly near the hospital, and a good- 
sized piece of it came through the roof of one 
of the outlying wards, struck a lamp that was 
burning and smashed it, carrying away a thick 
iron bar that supported it; fortunately, none of 
the patients were hit, and nothing was set on 
fire. After half past ten o'clock the firing 
slacked off a little, and on timing the shells 
there seemed to be about eight minutes between 
them, so I thought I would have time to get 
home between two; just as I was preparing 
to start, though, they began again quickly, so 
I decided to wait. We expected they would 
surely stop at midnight, for the Boers are con- 
sistent in that one respect — they don't fight on 
Sunday. Later on, about 11.15 o'clock, I de- 
termined to make for home after the next shell, 
and risk getting hit; so when it had cotuq I set 
out in fear and trembling, only to be stopped at 
the lodge gate by a man who wanted to take me 
off to a case. I sent him after a cab, as it was 
a long way off, and kept on towards home my- 
self. As luck would have it there were no 
more shells; I believe the Dutch were going 
by Transvaal time, according to which our half 
past eleven is midnight. 



THE RUSH FOR SHELTER 143 

Agnes had been sitting in our fort, which 
was nearly finished, fancying that every shell 
had struck me. Many of those I had heard 
had gone very near to the house, and one only 
just missed it, bursting about a hundred and 
fifty yards further on. After the case was over 
I went off to bed quite calmly, for I felt sure 
we should have a rest all the next day, and so 
it proved. All the same, I turned out as soon 
as it was light, about five o'clock, to finish my 
fort. I was not at all sure that the boys would 
turn up to work on Sunday, so as there was 
not much to do I decided to complete it myself. 

I had some sacks left, and began to fill these, 
but you don't make much progress shovelling 
with one hand and holding the sack open with 
the other. By-and-by Agnes looked over the 
top veranda to see what I was after, and seeing 
how awkward it was she came down and held 
the sacks while I shovelled. We had about 
eighteen, and just as they were all full the miner 
and the natives turned up. There was really 
not much to do except fill a gap of about two 
feet on one side of the fort, but as long as the 
boys had come I got them to alter the other 
side, where the entrance was. They had made 
a square entrance just like a doorv/ay, and very 
much too large, so that fragments of shell could 
come in quite easily if they were from the right 



144 BESIEGED BY THE BOERS 

direction. I made them build a sort of pro- 
jecting spur in front of the opening, so that no 
piece could possibly fly in unless it had first 
come through the house. I also got them to 
narrovf the doorway, leaving only just room 
enough to squeeze through ; indeed, you did not 
want to eat too much dinner or you would stick 
fast, it was such a close fit. This did not mat- 
ter much on siege fare, however, for we were 
in little danger of over-eating. 

When this work was done I still needed a 
lot of sacks to make the place secure, so I went 
down to Dr. Stoney's brother and got some 
from him. He had promised me a few, but I 
found he could let m.e have a lot — far more 
than the boy I took with me could carry — so 
1 borrowed his Scotch cart and two horses, and 
we tumbled the sacks in. Of course 1 rode 
home on top of the pile, much to the amuse- 
ment of Dr. Stoney and his brother, who stood 
on their veranda and jeered at me. The for- 
mer's only regret was that his camera was out 
of gear, for he declared that ''the sight of Kim- 
berley's boss doctor sitting on a pile of sacks 
in a Scotch cart, clad in dirty flannels and a big 
Boer hat, with a little Hottentot as driver and 
a raw Kaffir in a red shirt as footman was too 
good to be lost." One of my best patients cut 
me dead on the way up because he did not rec- 



THE RUSH FOR SHELTER 145 

ognise me, but nobody worried much about 
clothes at that time. 

With the fresh lot of sacks the boys finished 
up the fort in style. I had been in too many 
stuffy forts that week to neglect ventilation in 
my own, so I built in a strong iron grating op- 
posite the entrance, in a place where it was 
practically impossible for any bit of shell to 
come, and it answered splendidly. There was 
a nice current of air through all the time. 
When the miner took his boys away he said, "I 
don't know anything about shells, but if the 
whole house falls on that fort it won't hurt it." 

That was my view, too; so long as the big 
gun kept in the same place we were absolutely 
safe, but if they started others in different quar- 
ters we might not feel so happy. The fort 
was seven feet square and seven high, so my 
six foot three had heaps of room in every direc- 
tion. Agnes pinned sheets and big bath towels 
all round the walls inside, brought our bedding 
and mattresses down into it, with a looking- 
glass, a clock, some books, a box of sweets, and 
all sorts of other gear, and we had provisions 
close by if things were really bad ; so when we 
had pinned a photograph of Kitchener on the 
wall with a big diamond brooch we felt as jolly 
as could be expected. We slept in the fort 
every night after that, for the Boers often 



146 BESIEGED BY THE BOERS 

started their gun at daylight, and if we were 
upstairs we had to keep our ears pricked up 
to hear the first shot and then bolt for the fort, 
while if we spent the night in our retreat we 
slumbered calmly, feeling that if a shell did 
happen to get us there destiny must be too 
decidedly against us to interfere with its 
workings. 

Our servants were told that they could come 
into it any time they heard the bugle, and Lizzie 
took advantage of this permission for a few 
times when she was handy, but as a rule she 
did not bother, and was really very plucky. 
John, our Zulu, preferred to get behind the big 
water-tank. I don't think that would have 
saved him, but he was happy there, so it was 
all right He was very amusing one day; we 
heard Lizzie lecturing him about something, 
and he retorted : ''Don't make such a noise ; I 
can't hear the gun go off." (The boom of that 
gun would have extinguished a megaphone.) 

I shall not forget this Sunday in a hurry. 
It was a day. First of all, everybody was de- 
lighted that it was Sunday, for we appreciated 
to the full the beauties of "a day of rest" when 
that meant rest from shells. Kimberley is not 
exactly composed of Sunday-school superin- 
tendents, and as a rule, is rather bored by Sun- 
days, but this one was a shining exception. 



THE RUSH FOR SHELTER 147 

Then, again, everywhere you went forts were 
being built, and the clang of sheet-steel, railway 
rails, old iron railway sleepers, and the like was 
heard all over the place. The streets were full of 
carts, hand-carts, and wheel-barrows, and even 
natives carrying materials for forts. Many peo- 
ple could not get boys, the demand was so great 
for labour, so they had to. do the work them- 
selves. Several of the merchants had large 
stocks of the coarse Boer salt, which is made 
by crystallisation from the salt-pans, and they 
made forts of this. It is packed in large sacks 
and answered splendidly. In the first bom- 
bardment I had seen at a baker's a fort made 
entirely of sacks of flour. It was very efficient 
and a monument to his ingenuity, but I was 
just as pleased that I did not deal with that par- 
ticular baker. The gem of the collection in the 
way of forts was one I saw in the Malay Camp. 
It belonged to a coolie, and he had a large dog 
in a kennel. He evicted the dog and banked 
up the kennel with old zinc baths and paraffin 
tins filled with earth. I have no doubt he was 
a little king in that yard, for nobody else there 
had a fort at all. 

Towards afternoon the vague rumours of a 
heavy bombardment beginning directly after 
midnight began to take shape, but the shape 
was different in each house. Everybody was 



148 BESIEGED BY THE BOERS 

sure, though, that Monday was going to be a 
bad day, and in the face of that it seemed im- 
material whether there were to be two new big 
guns or twenty. Early in the afternoon notices 
signed by Mr. Rhodes were posted up in many 
places and sent around the town on a cart. 
These were to the effect that women and chil- 
dren were advised to take shelter in the two 
big mines. It was promised that arrangements 
Avould be made to lower them down, and make 
them as comfortable as possible. This, being 
signed by Mr. Rhodes, was looked upon as a 
confirmation of the rumours, and many people 
at once concluded that Mr. Rhodes had had 
private information as to what was going to 
happen on the morrow. A regular panic en- 
sued in consequence. 



CHAPTER X 

A NEW USE FOR DIAMOND MINES 

Later in the afternoon the streets were again 
filled, but this time with people hurrying to 
the mines with their children. Some carried 
their babies, others bore blankets or bedding, 
others food. It was a heterogeneous proces- 
sion, but all loaded up with something. Cabs 
could not be got, all the horses being turned out 
to earn their own living, since there was no 
forage left except for the military horses, so 
every one had to walk. As I went round seeing 
my patients I was asked by them all what I 
advised them to do. I knew the mines under- 
ground pretty well, and though the places the 
people would go to were cool and lofty, my 
advice always was, *'If you have a fairly strong 
fort of your own don't go down below." 

This seemed reasonable on the face of it to 
me, for there must be intervals between the 
firing during which you could get food and a 



15Q BESIEGED BY THE BOERS 

bath and so on at home, and the prospect of 
being shut up in the same compartment with 
about a hundred children was hardly sufficiently 
alluring to compensate for the extra danger 
incurred by staying above ground. 

I believe Mr. Rhodes' original intention was 
to offer shelter in the mines to those who had 
no place of shelter to go to, or who had insuffi- 
cient protection of their own. Many of the 
poor people had no means of making shelters 
for themselves, and could neither afford the 
material nor the labour necessary, and it was 
to these that the mines were offered. The 
notice, however, did not state so, and many 
better-class people went down. The mine- 
heads were crowded with people, and though 
the workmen began to lower them down at 
about half past five it was long after midnight 
before they were all in the mines. More than 
a thousand went down Kimberley Mine, and 
about fifteen hundred were taken into the De 
Beers, yet neither in letting them down nor 
hauling them up again, nor during their four 
days' stay below was there a single accident. 

All this time provisions, or rather luxuries, 
had been getting dearer. We had a fowl for 
dinner, price 15^.^, and we bought some eggs for 
22s.^ a dozen. Vegetables were very scarce and 

1 About $3.60. 2 About $5.85. 



] 



fl ^ 






i4 




Z, ^ 






u. > X 



<. u i^" 



" h 

^ H «-■ V- 
- li.- Z -J 

■< OH 

X I..- o 
to k- 



2 



o 



3- . 




NEV/ USE FOR MINES 151 

often unprocurable ; we used to make salad of a 
weed that grew in our garden. We had planted 
several beds of things that did not come up or 
died for want of water, but this weed came up 
instead, and very handy we found it. 

Shelling did actually begin about seven 
o'clock on Monday morning, February 22d, but 
in a half-hearted sort of a way, and not much 
damage was done; in fact, the whole day's per- 
formance was a pleasant surprise, as we had 
expected a lively time. Our old friend was still 
the only big gun at work. The streets were 
almost deserted, for in addition to the people 
who had gone down the mine many had fled to 
Beaconsfield for safety. Beaconsfield lies at 
the foot of a hill, and Kimberley on the top of 
it, so Beaconsfield is not visible from the loca- 
tion of the big gun; and as there is an open 
space nearly half a mile wide between the two 
places I expect the Boers thought they were 
as likely to hit this as the houses, and did not 
care to waste shells. 

The patient I operated on on Saturday moved 
down yesterday, also the man whose leg was 
hit by a piece of shell a few days ago. The 
gun could reach Beaconsfield with the greatest 
ease, and soon after this last man moved a big 
shell landed fairly close to his house there, but 
that was the only one which got so far. The 



152 BESIEGED BY THE BOERS 

shells which flew such a distance were curious 
to listen to. When this one went off I was at 
a house about as near to the gun as I could go. 
We heard the shell go over, and then its noise 
became more and more indistinct, until when 
far away the usual zuhi;^ seemed to be quite lost, 
and the noise reminded me of an empty cart 
galloping down a country lane far away on a 
still night. Then it plunged into something 
and burst. 

One of the shells fired a block of four houses 
in Kenilworth, but I do not think they were 
burnt out. Another struck the street about 
twenty yards from a house where one of my 
private nurses was nursing a patient. It did 
not burst, but bounced off again through an iron 
fence, making a big clatter, and disappeared, 
nobody knows where. The nurse was splen- 
didly plucky, and so was the patient. The 
house in which they were was near the foot of 
the conning tower, and therefore was liable to 
be hit at any time, but neither nurse nor patient 
wanted any shelter. The latter lay calmly in 
bed and said she did not expect she would get 
hurt, and the nurse never flinched, but looked 
after her like a brick. The nurse took me to 
look over the back fence at a sight I don't ever 
expect to see again. This was a lot of Kaffir 
women building themselves a shelter with heavy 



NEW USE FOR MINES 153 

mine timbers. Everybody was busy, and no 
one could be spared to fix them up, so they were 
told to take the timber and build for themselves, 
and they did in a fashion quite indescribable. 

To-day a shell went through a nice new two- 
storied house not far from the Sanatorium. It 
was built soon after mine, and by the same ar- 
chitect, Jarvis. He always professed to believe 
that the Boers were in the right, but how he 
will feel when he hears that they have wrecked 
one of his very special houses I don't know. 
There were twelve people scattered about the 
building and not one of them was touched, but 
most of the upper story was wrecked and will 
have to be rebuilt. A suit of clothes hanging 
up was riddled to such an extent that three 
more tears would have caused it to fall into 
little bits. It was a really ludicrous sight; no 
self-respecting scarecrow would be seen dead 
beside them. 

Another shell burst in the hospital grounds 
about twenty yards from the side of a ward 
full of patients, and later on a shell dropped 
into an aloe thicket there, but did not burst. 
These aloes are very thick and tough, so they 
stopped the shell without leaving a mark on it. 
It is the nicest specimen I have seen, and will 
no doubt be mounted and put in the entrance 
hall as a trophy, if we ever do come out of our 



154 BESIEGED BY THE BOERS 

troubles right side up. The hospital porter 
fished it out of the aloes and commenced to ex- 
periment upon it with a stick, giving it a good 
old stir-up, and smoking all the time. Dr. Rus- 
sell admired his zeal, but thought him lacking 
in discretion, and made him put it in a tub of 
water before he proceeded with his experiments. 
By the way, a friend told me a good yarn about 
one of these big shells to-day. Wherever a 
shell falls, whether it bursts or not, there is a 
rush for it, as both shell and pieces are market- 
able if you don't wish to stick to them yourself. 
My friend was out with the cattle guard, and a 
big shell fell close to two natives who were 
with him and did not explode. It was rather 
too hot to carry off, so they fought vigorously 
for possession, and the victor sat down on it to 
take care of it till it had cooled enough for him 
to take it away. 

I heard of another little joke to-day which 
amused me mightily. A certain man built a 
large and fine Ai copper-bottomed fort. A 
neighbour came to inspect it and found great 
fault with it, in fact condemned it altogether 
and strongly advised the proud owner to take 
his family down the mine for safety. This he 
promptly did. Then the neighbour, having a 
miserable fort of his own, took possession of 
the good one with equal promptness, and all 
was peace — until the owner returned. 



NEW USE FOR MINES 155 

To-day we had no newspaper, but a little slip 
came out saying, for reasons that would be ex- 
plained afterwards, the paper had shut down 
for a time. We none of us required an expla- 
nation, for we all expected this to happen to- 
day. For some time there had been friction be- 
tween the paper and the military censor, as the 
latter refused to let anything but the vaguest ac- 
counts of the siege and our general condition 
be heliographed through. When the big gun 
started several correspondents tried to wire 
about it, as it seemed to us it was time for our 
relief column to hustle a bit. But that was not 
the censor's idea. He flatly refused to let any 
information of the use of a bigger gun go 
through at all. Whether he actually got it out 
or not I do not know, but if he didn't this cast- 
iron phrase was surely on the tip of his tongue : 
"It might interfere with the military situation." 

O Lord! that "military situation." It was 
the answer to every conundrum you liked to 
ask all through the siege. After this the paper 
got mad, and on Saturday morning dodged the 
censor and came out with a very strong leader 
on the foolishness of such censorship, and 
just walked into the military people all round. 
So we were not surprised to get no paper to- 
day, and we were not particularly disappointed, 
for there was no news at all, and we had become 
a little tired of the stories of the Battle of Wa- 



156 BESIEGED BY THE BOERS 

terloo and other ancient history with which the 
dearth of news had been helped out. Even the 
Mother Siegel man had ceased to trot out new 
pitfalls in the way of advertisements. I do not 
think the paper was suppressed, but as the mili- 
tary possessed all the channels of information 
I fancy they simply shut them all up. The re- 
sult was the same anyhow — no paper. 

February 13th. — We had rather a rest from 
the shells to-day. Only about twenty came in 
altogether; these did a fair amount of damage 
all the same, and wore on the people's nerves 
a good deal. Many of my patients stayed in 
their shelters all the time, and as it was a hot 
day and many of the shelters were very small 
and stuffy they suffered accordingly. One shell 
struck the Presbyterian church. The English 
church had been hit in the first bombardment, 
but the Dutch church escaped altogether. It 
was curious to notice that many people among 
the Dutch took shelter in their church when 
the shelling was on. Either they had greater 
faith than the other religions, or, what is far 
more likely, they had had word from their 
friends on the outside that that edifice would 
not be shelled. We had lots of traitors in the 
place who went to and fro as much as they 
pleased, and though I don't think the gunners 
could see the Dutch church, I have no doubt 



NEW USE FOR MINES 157 

they had accurate plans of the town and could 
locate all the big buildings. 

Two shells went into Nazareth House, the 
Catholic Orphanage, or rather one dropped just 
at the back door and the other burst overhead, 
and a big bit of it went through the roof into 
the Sisters' sitting room. This last was a shrap- 
nel, and was the first of the big-gun shrapnels I 
had seen. They are not quite the same as the 
smaller ones which have become familiar. These 
have a big solid base weighing fully fourteen 
pounds. On this a thin steel sheet is fastened 
to make the receptacle for the bullets. The latter 
are about the size of ordinary marbles and are 
not loose, but lie in holes in cast-iron discs, like 
marbles on a solitaire board. These discs are 
divided into lots of small pieces by deep notches, 
which are so arranged that when the shell bursts 
the pieces will come apart easily and fly about 
like the bullets ; each piece, moreover, has about 
a dozen jagged corners, and would make a 
ghastly wound. The discs are threaded on a 
wide copper tube, which conducts the flame 
from the fuse at the point of the shell to the 
charge near its base, and rips the shell open 
when it bursts. The steel case takes on all sorts 
of outlandish shapes, for it does not fly to pieces, 
but just gets bent and twisted up, making very 
queer noises as it flies through the air. I heard 



158 BESIEGED BY THE BOERS 

one whistle just like a hooter. This particular 
Nazareth one looked more like the breast-plate 
of an ancient suit of armour or a dilapidated 
soup tureen than anything else. 

I forgot to say that on Sunday Rhodes some- 
how got a message from Lord Roberts to the 
effect that the column was going to move to 
our relief at once, and every day we heard ru- 
mours of heavy firing on both sides of Spyt- 
fontein, but nothing has come of it so far. 

February 14th. — To-day has been a great day. 
We do at last seem to have beaten the wily 
Boer on his own ground. Shelling began about 
as early as usual, but they treated us to some 
small shells from a gun in their old position 
near the Lazaretto, and one of these killed a 
man working in a bakery quite early in the 
morning. The big gun was evidently trying 
for the army office just behind us, and several 
of its shells came rather close to us when we 
were at breakfast. I hate to be disturbed at 
my meals either by patients or shells, so I 
sat tight and proceeded. I had got well used 
to the bombardment by this time, and though 
I had the instinct to take cover each time very 
well developed, I managed to resist it. We 
had all found, in fact, that the only thing to 
do was to take a good grip of yourself and sit 
fast. If you once gave way and let yourself 



NEW USE FOR MINES 159 

go it was all up, and you had to strike out for 
the shelter every time the bugle went. I was 
seeing a patient in my office at the chemist's 
a few days before when a shell dumped itself 
into a store next door but one ; I felt that I was 
urgently needed elsewhere, but still I went on 
talking and fixed up the patient before I went 
downstairs, though the pieces smacked viciously 
against the window and roof. 

However, to return to breakfast, just as we 
were finishing a shell came very close, and when 
we rushed out to see where it was we found it 
had fallen and burst in the street just at the 
end of our yard. This was a shrapnel, too, 
but one of those that only explode when they 
strike, and consequently much less dangerous 
than the time-fuse ones, which burst overhead 
and rain bullets down on you. I think the 
Boers had used all their stock of solid shell, for 
I saw several during the day, all this kind of 
shrapnel. Yesterday the fourteen-pound base 
of one of these went through the water-tank 
which stands at the corner of the nurses' home 
at the hospital. That was the third in the 
grounds, and to-day several flew right over the 
building. One poor chap, a patient of mine, 
was so terrified by them that he insisted on 
going out, though his own place is much nearer 
the gun. He is very ill, and v/ill not be able 



160 BESIEGED BY THE BOERS 

to get much attention at home, so I am afraid 
he will die. I hardly think even the Boers in- 
tend to hit the hospital. These were merely 
bad shots at the Sanatorium, where Mr. Rhodes 
is staying. The shot which killed Labram was 
a bad shot at the town-hall, and the one which 
killed the woman and child I spoke of earlier 
was intended for the conning tower. They 
have never yet hit a thing they aimed at, but 
they have done some damage all the same. The 
most wonderful shell of all was one which fell 
to-day at Dr. Fuller's gate. It just ran its nose 
under the curbstones at the edge of the pave- 
ment and burst there. Two big stones were 
flung "aside, but the biggest one, a solid blue 
whinstone block about twenty inches long by 
six inches wide and ten inches deep, was thrown 
right up on to the roof of the house, and from 
there slid gently down. There it lies now, well 
above the street. I hope some photographer 
will take a snap at it there, or you will think 
some one else lies as well as the stone. 

So much for the Boers' day's work; now for 
ours. Early in the morning some natives came 
from Alexandersfontein to Beaconsfield, and 
said the Boers there had all cleared out to help 
another commandoe which was in difficulties or 
wanted to do something funny and was not 
strong enough to do it single-handed, or some- 



NEW USE FOR MINES 161 

thing of that sort. The Beaconsfield town 
guard was a bit suspicious of a trap, but sent 
out spies to investigate, for Alexandersfontein 
was an important position for the Boers, as 
there was plenty of water there and it was only 
about four miles from Beaconsfield. The spies 
found the native story to be quite true, and 
some of the town guard, with help from the 
Lancashires, Light Horse, and Kimberley Rifles, 
went out and took possession. There were a 
few Boers left, but not enough to make any re- 
sistance ; several were killed and more wounded, 
amongst them a Dutch girl who was rather 
badly hurt in the left arm. Four were taken 
prisoners, and the girl was brought into the 
hospital as soon as possible and attended to. 
It is a regular Dutch performance to take 
women and children to the front. They have 
women with all the commandoes around us. I 
expect they imagine they are going to have a 
gay time looting the Kimberley shops, but that 
has yet to come. 

After our men had taken possession of Alex- 
andersfontein they lay low to wait for develop- 
ments. Before long four waggon-loads of pro- 
visions and stores for the Boers came along, 
right into our men's hands before the drivers 
realised that the scene had changed. There 
was any amount of stuff there besides these four 



162 BESIEGED BY THE BOERS 

waggon-loads, making about twelve loads alto- 
gether, so it made a fine haul — butter, vege- 
tables, grain, mutton, pigs, poultry, and all sorts 
of things that we had not seen for weeks. 
Some of the loot was sent up to Kimberley at 
once. 

I met the procession as I was coming in to 
lunch. It was first-rate, and the people turned 
out delighted, hoping that this was the begin- 
ning of better things. First came about twenty 
horses, then about the same number of cattle, 
and then a big waggon with a water-tank on 
it and drawn by sixteen lovely bullocks, so fat 
that our mouths watered just from looking at 
them. On the front of the waggon stood a 
man I knew in a statuesque attitude, with his 
rifle grounded and an ''I-did-it-though-you- 
wouldn't-think-it-of-me" expression on his face. 
Oh, it was great; but the effect was rather 
spoiled by an excited Kaffir who was standing 
up on the waggon-tilt just behind him, waving 
a riding boot in each hand and shouting, "Look 
at Cronje's boots" in Dutch. 

Our people sent out strong re-enforcements 
to Alexandersfontein, for they knew that the 
Dutch would return presently and would hanker 
after those provisions; since the place was on 
the flat within easy artillery range of kopjes 
on three sides, they expected a pretty warm 



NEW USE FOR MINES 163 

time, and they got it. Along in the afternoon 
the Boers did come back, and did not take to 
the new order of things at all kindly, but com- 
menced to make things hum both with rifles 
and artillery. Fortunately, there was a fairly 
good cover against rifle fire, and, as I have said 
before, the Dutch never could hit anything at 
which they aimed their artillery. A lot of lead 
was wasted and no harm was done, but we are 
very much afraid our men will not be able to 
hold out to-morrow if the Boers get re-enforce- 
ments and try to cut them off. We cannot spare 
any men. We have too few already, so they 
ma}^ have to retire, and that is always a dan- 
gerous business. 

It is rumoured to-day that General French 
is coming on through Jacobsdal to our relief, 
and is burning every Dutch laager and home- 
stead that he comes across on the way. Cer- 
tainly I saw three or four columns of smoke 
over in the Jacobsdal direction this afternoon, 
but I guess the rumour was made to fit them, 
for as far as we know French is over Colesburg 
wRj still. A rumour that Cronje has been cap- 
tured is probably equally false. It is too good 
to be true. Early this morning Major Rodger, 
the second in command of our mounted men, 
got shot by the Boers when out with a scouting 
party in the Alexandersfontein direction. He 



1^4 BESIEGED BY THE BOERS 

is a very good man, a keen sportsman, a first- 
rate shot, and full of the quiet, determined 
pluck that the men appreciate far better than 
hot-headed recklessness. They would follow 
him anywhere. He had sent some men to spy 
out the land behind some kopjes, and after a 
time saw two men coming out on the far side. 
Thinking they were his own troopers he rode 
off towards them, well in advance of the main 
body. When he got within about seventy yards 
he saw they were Boers; if he returned to his 
own men he knew they would shoot; ditto if 
he galloped up to them; and if he tried to get 
his revolver out of the holster they would cer- 
tainly pot him before he could fire. So he 
pulled his horse into a walk, and went right up 
to them. When quite close one of them spoke 
to him in Dutch: 

'Who are you?" 

''Oh, I am one of the fighting men from Kim- 
berley," he answered. 

The words were hardly out of his mouth 
before the gallant pair turned round and fled 
over the veldt for all they were worth. When 
they got about half a mile away they came up 
to some of their own men hidden in a sluit, and 
then they all fired at Rodger together; but in 
the meantime his men had come up, and after 
a volley or two the Boers suddenly remembered 



NEW USE FOR MINES 165 

that it was breakfast time and went off. Rod- 
ger was hit in the left forearm, and one of the 
bones were broken, but he went on and finished 
his day's work, and only came to look for me 
at half past five in the afternoon. I was out, 
so Mackenzie saw him and wanted to order him 
off duty, but Rodger flatly declined, and I don't 
expect he will appear on the sick-list at all. 
The regulars call our Kimberley forces *'tin 
soldiers," and are a little inclined to be superior 
with them, but if this is a sample the tin breed 
is the one for us. 

I was down the Kimberley Mine when Rodger 
was looking for me. I had an hour or so to 
spare, and thought I would see if I could be 
of any help down there, though Mackenzie had 
been down in the morning. Still, I knew that 
there were a lot of small ailments amongst the 
people there, and as they had been down for 
three days a second visit would not hurt them. 

I got to the mine just as they were sending 
the tea down. There were a thousand people 
to be fed, but the Company was quite equal to 
it. A staff of their ambulance men had been 
put on duty, and they were sending down huge 
quantities of corned beef sandwiches, in con- 
densed milk boxes for convenience in handling, 
and buckets of tea and coffee with condensed 
milk in it. This was at a time when nobody 



166 BESIEGED BY THE BOERS 

above ground could get either corned (tinned) 
beef or condensed milk without a doctor's 
order, and as there was a fair supply of fresh 
milk for the children, those down below fared 
better than those above. I went first down to 
the lowest level, fifteen hundred feet below the 
surface, and well as I knew the mine I was as- 
tonished to see how different it looked when 
full of people. They were in the large cham- 
ber cut in the rock, past one end of which the 
shaft runs. It is about twenty feet high and 
thirty or forty wide, and leads away into the 
mine at the far end. 

The whole place was lighted up as usual with 
electric light, and was fairly cool, but it was 
just packed with people. Most of the children 
had been laid down to sleep on the rugs and 
blankets or mattresses they had brought with 
them, and these things just covered the floor. 
Except for a passage down the whole length 
of the chamber there did not seem to be an 
inch of space. I moved about gingerly for 
fear of treading on somebody, and saw a few 
people who had little troubles or wanted to 
know how things were up above, but the people 
were as good as gold, and did not make a single 
complaint. Many of the babies were a little 
feverish from the draughts, which were un- 
avoidable, and from the rather close atmos- 




\ 



,.»srf 



^X 




"*T^^' '"'* 



LIEUTENANT-COLONEL R. G. KEKKWICH, 



NEW USE FOR MINES 167 

phere, but this was far better than I had ex- 
pected, considering the number of people there. 
Except those who were looking after things, I 
saw hardly a single man. A few had come 
down at first, but public opinion had got rid 
of them by this time. I spent some time here 
talking to the people I knew. Many of them 
wanted to know whether I advised them to stay 
down or not. I said that if they were well I 
thought they should stay, but if they were feel- 
ing seedy and had a decently strong shelter up 
above I advised them to return, for the sake of 
the better air and conveniences. 

Then I went up to the next level, twelve hun- 
dred feet down, and found things just about the 
same, only it was cooler and the people were, if 
anything, packed closer. Walking round and 
dodging the sleeping babies reminded me of a 
visit I made to that place near Brigg, where the 
sea-gulls nest. There you could hardly put a 
foot down without damaging eggs or young 
birds, and it was just the same here. After 
looking round I went up top-side again, and 
found more people in the tunnel, which slopes 
down from the compound to the cage in which 
the boys descend. The bottom edge of this is 
about thirty feet below the ground, but opens 
into a large space round the engine house, so 
that many people who did not care to go down 



1,68 BESIEGED BY THE BOERS 

below took shelter here, where they could get 
out into the air between the spells of shelling. 
This place, however, had many drawbacks; it 
was only about three feet wide, and when you 
lay down people kept walking over you all the 
time, so it was not really so good as the mine. 
I forgot to mention, when speaking of the 
provisions captured at Alexandersfontein, that 
many of our men carried off anything that came 
handy in the eatable line. Some of them were 
busy chivvying fowls and turkeys, even when 
the Boer fire was hottest. But the butter was 
the greatest attraction. Most of it was com- 
mandeered by the military for the hospital, but 
I know of one man getting away with two 
pounds by sticking it on his arm', wrapping a 
handkerchief round it, and putting the whole 
thing into a sling as if he were wounded. 
Others came in with fowls and ducks slung 
across their saddles in regular campaigning 
style. 



CHAPTER XI 



RELIEF AT LAST 



To-day, February 15th, is almost too good to 
write about. Yesterday we were very skeptical 
about French's advance, and to-night he is here, 
having brought his men along one hundred and 
twenty miles in four days. It is almost too 
good to believe, and no one can realise what 
it means yet, it has been so unexpected. But 
I had better finish the story of the siege prop- 
erly, having got so far. Last night at about 
ten o'clock we heard heavy rifle firing out at 
Carter's Farm and Otto's Kopje, and a Maxim 
got to work, too. The Maxim is easy to iden- 
tify at a distance. It sounds like a street boy 
running along your freshly painted garden rail- 
ings with a stick. We wondered what on earth 
was happening. Had the Boers at last plucked 
up courage to attack? The rattle only lasted 
about half an hour, so evidently there was noth- 
ing very serious. In the morning we found it 



170 BESIEGED BY THE BOERS 

had just been a little ruse to divert the Boers' 
mind and keep their attention fixed while our 
men brought in the captured provisions from 
Alexandersfontein. We wanted them too badly 
to risk losing them for want of a little strategy, 
and that which we practised was quite success- 
ful. I got my share of yesterday's loot in the 
shape of three very large onions and a couple 
of vegetable marrows, and they were ''just 
lovely." 

The big gun started at about ten o'clock, and 
the cordite gun at Carter's put in a good deal of 
work also. This latter scared me badly during 
the morning. I had to see a lot of patients in 
the district to which it was paying particular 
attention, and I somehow felt that relief was 
close at hand, as the rumours of French's ad- 
vance were very persistent this morning, and 
yet, though no shell came near me, I could not 
get over a horrid feeling that it would be just 
my luck to get bowled over at the last moment 
after going scot free for so long. At one house 
where I called I could not make any one hear 
at the front door, so I went round to the back- 
yard gate, where I found all the children busy 
digging out a shell which had dropped there a 
few minutes before; the patient was safe in 
their fort. This was the last shell that small 
gun fired, and I think the big gun only put one 



RELIEF AT LAST 171 

more in before it retired from business alto- 
gether. All the morning we kept hearing that 
the Boers were trying all they knew to rout our 
men out of Alexandersfontein, but did not seem 
altogether big enough for the job; we hoped 
to let it go down into history at that, but were 
anxious all the same. 

At about half past three o'clock in the after- 
noon a man told me that French's column could 
be seen from the Beaconsfield debris heaps, but 
I did not believe it until I went over to the 
Club and found that it was quite true. Then I 
went straightway and bought the largest Union 
Jack I could get hold of, and Agnes tied it on 
a long stick and stuck it out from the end of 
our second story veranda for all the world to 
admire. We ourselves admired it more than 
anything else on the face of the earth just then. 
After that I drove up on to the veldt about a 
mile (out to a place where one could get a view 
of the surrounding country) and had a good 
look round. In several directions there were 
clouds of dust, showing that big bodies of men 
were on the move, but though the relief-work 
natives there declared they were English it was 
impossible to be sure. (Somehow I have for- 
gotten to mention those relief works. They 
were started by Mr. Rhodes quite early in the 
siege. The roads of one part of the town. 



172 BESIEGED BY THE BOERS 

which had only been acquired by the De Beers 
Company a few months ago, were shockingly 
bad, so when it became necessary to find some- 
thing for natives and others who had ''got no 
work to do" to make a living wage at, they 
were turned on to these roads, and several thou- 
sand of them have been working ever since, and, 
besides making a living for themselves, have 
wonderfully improved that part of the town.) 

Finding that nothing could be seen from 
where I was, I came home to fetch Agnes, and 
started for Beaconsfield, in which direction it 
seemed most probable that our troops would 
arrive; but when I was passing the hospital 
gate I saw the ambulance go in. As my post 
was there when there were any wounded 
around, I went to see what was happening, and 
found two fresh wounded cases. I told Agnes 
where to get the best view in Beaconsfield, and 
sent her off alone. 

Both wounded men were shot in the head. 
Gne had a depressed fracture of the skull, and 
I had to trephine and remove some splinters 
of bone that were driven in, but it was quite a 
simple, straightforward case, and the man will 
probably recover without a hitch of any sort. 
The other was a most interesting case. The pa- 
tient, a boy of twelve, had been playing about on 
the outskirts of the Alexandersfontein fighting, 



RELIEF AT LAST 173 

picking up bits of shell and other unconsidered 
trifles, and generally having a good time. But 
at last I suppose he got too venturesome and 
went to pick up some shell within range 'of the 
Boer rifles; they potted him right through the 
head, from above the right eye to above and 
behind the left ear. He was badly collapsed and 
a terrible sight. If it had been six months ago 
I should have said he would certainly die, but 
I know Mauser bullet wounds better now, and 
should not be a bit surprised if he pulled 
through all right. By the time I had fixed him 
up it was nearly dark, and I had missed the 
actual entry of the relief column, but I was in 
time to see the arrival of General French and 
his staff in the town. Agnes had seen the 
whole thing down in Beaconsfield, and had been 
one of a group of ladies who nearly pulled the 
first man off his horse, they were so delighted 
to see him. 

The scene in the town and at the Club can't 
be described; I am not going to try to do it; 
but it was quieter than one would have ex- 
pected; everybody was far too deeply moved 
to be noisy. Directly the relief was an estab- 
lished fact they began to haul up the people 
from the mines, and by midnight all were home 
again, none the worse for their four days' stay 
underground. 



174 BESIEGED BY THE BOERS 

And so our siege is over, and though we have 
had nothing Hke so bad a time as Mafeking and 
Ladysmith, if all we hear about them is true, 
still it was quite bad enough. We all feel just 
w^hat a friend said to me to-night: *'If ever I 
am in a country where they begin to talk about 
war again, I shall take the first boat to the far 
side of the world and stop when I get there." 

We have been shut up for one hundred and 
twenty- four days, from October 14th to Feb- 
ruary 15th, and during the whole of this time 
the Boers have never once attacked the town 
or even been within rifle shot of it. Through 
their friends in town they must have known, al- 
most to a man, the strength of our defence 
forces, and yet they have contented themselves 
with shelling us from a distance. It is funny 
to see in the Dutch papers how every general 
is alluded to as "Fighting" General Snyman 
or De la Rey or whatever his name may be. 
We wonder whether there are other classes of 
generals — praying generals or perhaps even 
funking generals. 

I spoke of our defence forces just now; it 

will interest you to know who and what they 

were. 

Mounted Men. 

Kimberley Light Horse 335 

Cape Police, about 300 

Diamond Fields Horse, about. . . 150 




HON. CECIL J. RHODES. 



RELIEF AT LAST 175 

This makes a total of 785, but what with sick- 
ness, guards on barriers, cattle guards, etc., we 
could never turn out more than 550 for any- 
offensive measures against the Boers, and as 
they were all mounted infantry they were really 
not of much use. 

Next came the artillery: 

Diamond Fields Artillery. ..... 118 

Royal Artillery 95 

In all 213. 

Then the infantry: 

Town Guard 2,794 

Lancashires, roughly 500 

Kimberley Rifles 380 

A total of 3,674. 

Out of the total number of available defen- 
ders (4,672) only about 600 were regulars, or 
900, including the police, and we feel proud to 
think that our own men have done so much 
towards the defence of our town. 

But the two men of whom we are most proud 
are Colonel Kekewich and Mr. Rhodes — of the 
colonel for the even-handed justice with which 
he has administered everything for the benefit 
of rich and poor alike, and of Mr. Rhodes for 
the magnificent way in which he has acted as a 
guardian angel to us all. 



JUN 7 1900 



Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process. 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: June 2003 

PreservationTechnologies 

A WORLD LEADER IN PAPER PRESERVATION 

1 1 1 Thomson Park Drive 
Cranberry Township, PA 16066 
(724)779-2111 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 





